


create / detonate

by pprfaith, reena_jenkins



Series: create / detonate [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Amnesia, Audio Format: M4B, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, Avengers Assemble!, BAMF Tony Stark, BAMF everyone, Betrayal, Brainwashing, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Community: pod_together, F/M, Female Tony Stark, Full Podfic Downloads In Chapter 9, Gore, Hydra, Iron Man Spoilers, Natalia Alianovna Romanova is a Triple Agent, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Panic Attacks, Podfic, Podfic & Podficced Works, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, REENA MADE ME DO IT, Red Room and Hydra are their own warnings, SHIELD, Steve Rogers woke up cranky after his 70-year nap, Steve is a noble stubborn asshole, Strike Team Delta, Tasha Stark: Not Your Mental Health Role Model, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Trust Issues, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Villain Tony Stark, Violence, aftereffects of rape, avenge or revenge - it all means the same thing, discussions of rape, discussions of torture, except not really, living in the future, mentions of child abuse, so many trust issues, they're all just really screwed-up, unhealthy everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 03:24:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 9
Words: 71,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4375343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith, https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where Natasha Stark still dreams of fire and blood, the Winter Soldier wakes ahead of schedule and nothing happens the way it was meant to. </p><p>(People don’t have a purpose.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. October

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [create / detonate](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6801832) by [Svadilfary](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Svadilfary/pseuds/Svadilfary)
  * Inspired by [create / detonate: a fanmix](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4528422) by [pprfaith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith), [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins). 
  * Inspired by [[art] a softer killer](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4583955) by [pprfaith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith), [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins). 



 

+

+

October

+

 [ **Stream this podfic chapter on your moble device here**](http://reena.parakaproductions.com/podfics/create%20:%20detonate/01%20create%20_%20detonate%20-%20October.mp3)

+

+

Tasha feels a little bit like Indiana Jones.

You know, if Indiana Jones were female, a genius, had a hole in his chest and wanted to burn down every single warehouse full of artefacts he ever found.

Because that’s exactly what Tasha wants to do.

_Burn it down._

When she found the address for this place hidden in Obie’s encrypted drives – really Obie, hiding things from me _digitally_? Shame on you - when she found this place, she considered, seriously and without the slightest bit of remorse, using one of the last Jericho prototypes on it.

Just punch in the coordinates and press the shiny, red button. Never have to set foot in this place, with its code-worded inventory, with all the things Obie stole from her, all the prototypes that went ‘faulty’ over the years, all the things that were dismissed for being ‘too dangerous’. All the stuff he protected her from, all the shipments that got lost, everything.

It all ran through here.

He stole her heart, not once but twice, not metaphorically, but literally, bloodily, gorily, _gently_. He stole her heart and this is proof positive that he stole her mind, too. For years and years and years.

_You’re brilliant, Tash, you’re amazing. Your brain is a marvel. You’re better than Howard ever was. This company would be nothing without you._

All lies. All stupid, fucking lies and she fell for it, lonely and dumb and desperate, trying to live up to a family name she hated and a legacy she wanted to spit on. But it was okay, because Obie was there. Obie was family, Obie loved her. Obie was good to her, took care of her, helped her.

Obie was Obie.

Obie paid terrorists to murder her with her own bombs and when they didn’t, he lost the ransom note and pretended he’d never dealt with them at all, left her to months of water boarding and hot coals, of hard fists and manically laughing _fuckers_ who took pleasure in ripping her battery from her arms and making her scramble like a desperate animal, out of breath and _dying_ , to reconnect the wires before it was too late, of having things taken from her that no-one ever had a right to take.

And yet, somehow, some part, some fucking, _stupid_ part of her, misses him. Misses pizza at two am, misses his hand on the back of her neck, his deep, soothing voice, the way he smiled. She spent half her life partially in love with that man, simply because he paid any kind of attention to her at all and now that he’s gone, that part of her keeps asking, “But when will he be back? I need him.”

That’s the worst thing. He tried to kill her – did kill her, in so many ways – and she still misses him. How pathetic is that?

So, yeah, she considered burning this place down, just so she wouldn’t have to see how deep his treachery really went, how much he really took from her.

How he must have laughed behind her back.

But she is Natasha Maria Stark and she is made of metal and spite and pain has never stopped her before. She survived having him lovingly, carefully pull her heart from her chest, survived murdering him in a flash of light and desperation.

She can survive this.

+

Obie had his own filing system. For his files, his records, his books. His warehouses full of ill-gotten loot. Alphabetically, by year, and then by increasing importance. Easy enough. Unoriginal. She used to tease him about it. He used to laugh and calmly reorder everything she’d fucked up just to mess with him.

Tasha starts with A, right by the front doors. Andromeda is a missile guidance system she scrapped years ago for being too vulnerable to hacks.

\- “I’ll get rid of it, kid.”

“Thanks, Obie.” –

She moves on. It takes her until C to realize that most, but by far not everything in here, is hers.

Beta 638/PQ-1 is a wooden box that really does look like something out of an Indiana Jones flick. Inside are papers – actual papery papers, good god, Obie – in German. Some handwritten, some typewritten. Tasha’s German isn’t really up to snuff, but she understands the dates in the upper right corners just fine.

This is Nazi loot.

Something that tastes like bile and feels like lead settles in her stomach.

Under E she finds a whole stack of boxes with a snake-skull-thing branded into the wood. HYDRA. She recognizes the symbol from Howard’s glory days with the SSR.

Why the fuck did Obie have HYDRA stuff?

Her search grows more frantic as she starts skipping over familiar Stark Industries cases and jumping right to the things marked in foreign letters and words. HYDRA keeps coming up, but there are other things, too. Artefacts marked in Arabic, files in Russian and Slovakian, stacks of books in French, in German.

What for, Obie? Blackmail? Research? A really weird hoarding problem? Why would you need to know about Red Skull? What is the Red Room?

She thought it was just her. Thought she was an easy target and he simply took the opportunity too good to pass up. Golden Goose. She thought it was just her, that he used her because he could. But this is… this is an evil overlord’s goddamn lair.

This is…

Tasha gasps, bites her lip, tries to count to twenty and lurches forward to puke in the nearest corner at thirteen.

This is proof positive that she never knew Obie at all, because Obie, Obie was a monster. A monster who kept research on human experimentation in his basement, right next to bombs meant for terrorists and embalmed body parts of failed HYDRA-made mutants. Miracles, the files call them. Tasha dry-heaves.

It should make her feel better, to know that it wasn’t her stupidity that turned him into a greedy, evil bastard; that he seems to have always been this way.

It really, really doesn’t.

+

She gets back in her car, drives thirty miles to the nearest liquor store, buys out half their stash of scotch and calls Pepper to tell her she’ll be MIA for a few days. Pep hates it, swears at her, yells at her and still sounds a little choked up because, hey, what do you know, it’s only been three days since they murdered Obie together.

Although Pepper is not to blame. Pepper didn’t kill Obie so much as she saved Tasha and that makes all the difference in the world.

Tasha on the other hand, knew exactly what she was ordering Pep to do. The other woman deserved better. _Deserves_ better, than to be somebody else’s weapon.

She swallows it, the bile, the self-hatred, the pain, swallows it like she has been swallowing things for most of her life, tucks it away, let’s her best friend rant.

“I’ll call you,” she finally says, when Pepper runs out of steam, and hangs up. “JARVIS,” she tells her the dial tone, “keep an eye on things for me, but only ping me if the roof’s on fire, or something, okay?”

“ _Very well, Miss Stark._ ”

“Thanks, buddy.”

+

She cries her way through to M, then cusses until P, rants and raves and passes out drunkenly for a while on S. She sleeps, she drinks some more, she downloads a few language packages to her phone and learns a whole lot of Nazi propaganda words in German, learns medical terms in French. Brushes up on her Russian.

She finds things she sophisticated, ideas he brought to her as throw-away comments and like a fool, she grabbed them, ran with them, made them better, made them brilliant, and then handed them to him so he could set the world on fire with them. She punches a shipping container full high-tech torture equipment hard enough to bust skin and bruise knuckles.

It doesn’t help.

After a while, she goes back and starts tagging things to destroy with a spray-paint D.

A while after that, she stops because she realizes she’s tagging _everything_. She takes a long swig straight from the bottle and makes her way outside, closes the huge double doors and shakes the can of black spray paint she found with some maintenance shit early on. She paints the D as tall as she can, smack on the doors.

Then she heads back inside and keeps working, right up to W, which is the last letter in Obie’s macabre collection of well-ordered inhumanity.

W is interesting for two reasons. The first is the stack of accidentally-on-purpose misfiled papers she finds that finally tells her what the fuck is going on here. Trade and blackmail, mostly, it appears. It looks like Obie bought all kinds of clandestine shit he could get his hands on and then used it to either sweeten up or pressure the bad, bad people he got into bed with.

Clever.

Nauseating.

He conducted SI business in much the same way. Only… cleaner. Or so Tasha thought.

Fuck.

The second interesting thing in the W section is a crate.

It’s about the 286th crate she’s found, but it’s the first with these, frankly foreboding, dimensions. Seven feet long, about four feet broad and a bit over a food high. There are several other, weirdly shaped crates tagged as belonging with it. There’s cables running from the back of it toward an outlet in a nearby wall. A low, electrical hum says whatever is inside, it’s not dormant.

Missiles are transported in crates that look a little like this. Some artefacts, too. Many things, really.

But Tasha can’t help it. The moment she lays eyes on it, she knows that’s not what it is. That it’s not that harmless.

The top is neatly lettered in Cyrillic.

It says, _Winter_.

“Oh, please be a very eccentric freezer full of snow, or something equally ridiculous. Please, please, please,” she mutters as she grabs her trusty crowbar and starts prying open the lid.

For a moment, just a moment, she thinks she’s right after all. The… machine inside has a glass top, frosted over from the inside and seemingly filled with icy fog, obscuring anything inside.

She looks for a latch to open the giant ass freezer, finds something, hooks her finger into it and pulls. A pressure valve hisses at the far end of the construction, emitting bitingly cold air. It evaporates instantly, just like a magic trick. Tasha watches for a moment before turning back to the glass part.

Looks inside.

+

She learned not to scream. In Afghanistan, she learned not to scream. Because screams were admissions of surprise, of pain, of shock. She learned not to give those things, to hold them in. Learned to bite her tongue until she tasted copper and pretend she’d expected that punch to the kidneys, that kick, that slap, the whole time. Learned to pretend she didn’t want to die, or gouge someone’s eyes out, or sob when clumsy fingers pulled at her pants.

Sometimes, they put sand in the gruel they fed her and Yinsen.

She learned to smile as she chewed.

So Tasha doesn’t scream, doesn’t make a sound, just bites her tongue until it stings, blood running down her throat to make her feel sicker every time she swallows.

There is a face behind the glass.

There is a face inside that freezer, is a _man_ inside. His hair is dark, long and dirty, his eyes are closed, the rest of his face hidden by a black muzzle that seems perfectly shaped for him. Custom made.

There is a muzzled, frozen man in that thing.

And under his eyelids, she can see him dreaming.

Her first instinct is to rip the thing apart, to somehow pry it open and _get him out_.

She stops herself just in time, actually _thinks_. Can he survive without the systems? Would the shock of unhooking kill him? How long has he been in there? Why is he in there? Is he dangerous? What will happen if she unthaws him? Will he hurt her? Run away? Start singing?

She doesn’t know.

Obie kept live humans in his basement and Tasha doesn’t know anything at all anymore.

She presses her hand against the glass, feels the chill. “I’ll get you out,” she says, then repeats it in rusty Russian. “I’ll get you out.”

+

Tasha plans to find everything tagged with his ‘Winter’ and work through it, only to realize early on that it’d take days. She’s been skimming files so far, speed reading occasionally. Just enough to figure out that, yep, the burn pile. Always the burn pile. But there are five filing cabinets full of data, several crates with more machines and other accessories. Going through them will take time.

And she needs out of this place before she starts screaming and forgets how to stop.

She might be unlearning how not to scream.

So she has JARVIS get Happy, has Happy get a truck from somewhere _not SI_ , stick a generator in it, and then meet her by the liquor store, trade vehicles. Sends him home and uses the suit to load up everything Winter comes with.

After that, she torches everything that could lead back to her, including the puddle of puke in one corner. It’s tempting, so tempting, to let the fire spread, let it eat all of this, every physical proof she has of how blind she was, how stupid and _usable_.

Instead she orders JARVIS to keep a constant eye on the place via any means necessary and just drives away.

Leaves the warehouse of horrors for another day. To sort, to destroy. To mourn and rage against. She doesn’t even fucking know. Should just get rid of it now.

But she can’t, she tells herself. God knows what half of this shit would do if it caught fire. She might sink half of California into the ocean, Buffy style.

That’s her excuse and she’s sticking with it.

+

Before Iron Man broke, the paps had set up tents in Tasha’s front yard, hoping to catch a glimpse of the damaged, broken, insane woman that’d crawled out of a cave in redacted, after redacted redacted redacted.

But then downtown LA went up in a pillar of white light and suddenly, Tasha Stark wasn’t interesting anymore. Iron Man was.

She considered, for a long, long moment, during the press conference, telling people the truth. Saying, “I am Iron Man,” and letting all the haters choke on that. On Tasha Stark building something so amazing they all came in their pants a little when they first saw it. At Iron Man, their new hero, their new hope, being a woman, being a bombed-out shell of their most hated celebrity.

She considered it.

But Tasha’s been five four and pretty all her life, has been Howard’s daughter and Maria’s mirror image, has been a _target_ for as long as she’s been breathing, and maybe if she were a man, she would have said fuck it, and just blurted out the truth. But she’s not. She’s not, and even in 2010 it goddamn matters.

Tasha has been a target all her life and even though she spits in people’s faces all the time, she also knows that if you’re going to use a weapon more than once, you better make damn sure no-one can get to it after the initial reveal. And if you want to feast on the blood of your fallen enemies – and Tasha _does_ \- you don’t let something stupid like pride get in the way of that.

Iron Man is an elusive hero and Tasha Stark is a fucking mess and the longer it stays that way, the less they’ll see her coming.

So she kept her mouth _shut_ , smiled for the cameras and didn’t bite off Coulson’s hand when he congratulated her on a ‘smart move’ with a pat on the shoulder, because _fuck him_. Obie knew where she lived, Obie knew where she slept. She trusted Obie. She’s not going to make that mistake again and ‘smart move’ has nothing to do with it. It’s survival.

Right now, she’s glad for it, because it means there are no paparazzi at her place to document her driving a big-ass truck into her underground garage, frozen Russian in the back.

She still makes sure to close the doors fast.

Then she gets back in the suit, unloads her precious cargo and orders two large pizzas. “JARVIS, my darling, lock everyone out, opaque glass, no-one, and I mean no-one comes in. Not even with an override.”

“ _Are you quite sure, Miss Stark?_ ”

“Yep. Whatever, or whoever this dude is, he’s probably not out to pet the puppies of this world. We don’t want anyone else at risk.”

“ _What about your own safety?_ ”

She laughs, knocks on the suit panels currently being pulled off her and doesn’t say more. JARVIS knows. JARVIS understands.

+

The oldest logs attached to Winter date back to 1945 and then there’s more, at least one every year. Some years read like maintenance, like someone made sure an unused machine was still operational. Crank the engine for five minutes, change out the oil, put it back in the garage.

Like that’s not a _human being_ in that damn tank.

Others, though, oh, others. Half the files are mission logs. Targets. Locations. Weapons.

The machines are even more gruesome. She’s not a medical doctor, but even she understands what those drugs do, those tools. Electricity, applied to the brain, chemicals, targeting long term memory, forcing compliance.

Basically, the frozen assassin comes with a mind-wipe kit. And Obie somehow got his hands on him all the way back in 1996. Fourteen years ago. For fourteen years, the man has slept in Obie’s basement and Obie just left him there. Left him there, next to the drugs meant to take away his will and the machines meant to erase all memory of who he used to be, before they froze him to be pulled out whenever they needed a weapon to aim.

She really thought she’d seen the pits of humanity in a cave in Afghanistan.

Jesus fucking Christ.

She should have saved that scotch.

“JARVIS,” she announces, camera smile in place as she makes jazz hands at the coffin – because that’s what it is – and announces, “We have here one freeze dried instant assassin. Just add water!”

She laughs.

It’s not really funny.

+

Falling asleep on a stack of files depicting the assassination of a family of six, youngest child barely three, Tasha dreams.

Her skin and clothes are damp, her chest aches, her mouth tastes like copper and death. Yinsen murmurs in his native tongue as he uses a bit of twine, strung between the front belt loops, to close her pants. The button is missing. Tasha can’t stop shivering, can’t stop flinching, goes stiff as a board every time the doctor stops talking. Every time she can’t be sure it’s him, anymore.

He keeps murmuring, keeps soothing her like a wild animal, and then his voice changes, goes deeper. Smoother. Obie stretches up, presses a kiss to her temple and a hand over her shredded heart.

Slowly, while she’s still shaking apart, he starts unhooking the wires, first one, then the other. He places the battery aside, pulls out the magnet. Reaches into her chest and starts rummaging around, making the occasional comment as he goes. Tasha watches.

She screams herself awake.

+

The coffin opens in two parts.

Tasha perches on the lower one, opens the top part and lets the cold air waft into the lab. It hurts against the metal of the arc reactor, the metal sending the chill straight down to the very bones of her. Reminding her it’s still _there_.

She shivers, places a hand over it, watches his eyes as they flicker and twitch under the lid. His hands are bound. The muzzle makes his breathing audible. There was no name anywhere in the files.

If he ever had one, it’s been erased.

She wonders if he’ll remember. If he’s still capable of it, after decades of being wiped clean, again and again. If he still knows how he lost his arm, or if that is gone, too. He didn’t lose it after 1945. It was already gone when HYRDA put him on ice.

Against her fingertips, the metal prosthesis feels even colder than her reactor casing. The port must be freezing.

“D’you even still feel it?” she mutters.

She’s talking to cryogenically frozen Russians now. Maybe she should have gotten some sleep in the past seventy two hours. “I got second degree burns the last time I was outside in the sun too long. But then, Afghan desert, so. It just… it feels like it goes right down to your soul, doesn’t it? If you believe in that shit, right? I don’t, really, at least not in conjunction to myself. If you told me Pep had a soul, yeah, sure. Pep’s all soul, really, I can buy that shit. But me? I’m all spare parts, metal and mechanics all the way down. There was this one guy once, at some sort of party, when I was a kid. We talked robotics for an hour and then he laughed and said it was like Howard made me in a lab. I was eight and I got so fucking worried, I actually started going through old files because, hey, it would have explained so much, right? Turned out he was only kidding. Flesh and blood. Well, mostly. Back then. You and me, I don’t think we got souls. Souls are for good people.”

He keeps breathing. It’s as good as agreement.

The muzzle clips in the back. It takes both hands to undo and she fumbles it twice, almost lands on top of him once and then finally gets it undone, half expecting some horror to lie beneath, a disfigurement, a scar. A mouth sewn shut, perhaps.

In a way, she’s right.

The muzzle drops away, dangling from where one strap is tangled in his messy hair, and underneath lies the worst kind of horror: the familiar.

Because Tasha knows that face.

He had this way of squinting into cameras with his head tilted slightly, looking over Captain America’s shoulder as if saying, “Do you have to?” Annoyed, maybe, with the constant attention, the hounding, of his best friend. And yet, there’s nary a picture of the good Captain without the slightly shorter man with the scruffy stubble.

Sergeant Barnes was Captain America’s second in command. Bucky Barnes was Steve Rogers’ best friend. Howard didn’t like him, snorted derisively when he was brought up in conversation, even decades later. Whether that was because he was closer to Captain Goddamn America than Howard ever managed to be, or because he was simply a boring, average man, Tasha never found out. All she knew, growing up on tall tales, was that she liked Barnes, simply because her perfect father didn’t.

Aunt Peggy liked him, too. He was clever, she said, funny, loyal. He died for his friend, not his country, falling to his death from a lonely train track in the Alps.

Falling into ice and the hands of Nazis who turned him into a monster.

Bucky Barnes deserved better than this.

“ _Miss Stark,_ ” JARVIS announces suddenly, “ _I fear that the cryo-chamber’s technology is not made to maintain its base temperature with the lid open for any amount of time. You must decide what to do within the next two minutes, or the man might start to awaken. And I must say, I strongly advise against letting that happen. We do not have enough data at this point to ascertain –_ “

“James Buchanan Barnes,” she interrupts, her gaze still on his face. God, he doesn’t look like he’s aged a day from those old reels, black and white and his eyes sparkling with something like gallows humor, something wicked and knowing.

Howard spent decades buying up every scrap of Captain America he could get his hands on, every bit of film. In one interview, Barnes was asked what it was like, to live in the shadow of a legend. Barnes had snorted and simply answered, “Well, you don’t get sunburn, for one.”

Tasha likes that. It’s the politest ‘fuck you’ she’s ever heard. Once, some asshole reporter wanted to know what it felt like, to live in Howard Stark’s shadow.

She used Barnes’ line.

The asshole didn’t get the fucking joke.

In the squirrely center of his servers, JARVIS computes. “ _You know him?_ ”

“Dad did. He was a Howling Commando.” _The_ Howling Commando. The only one who fell.

Oh. Wait.

“ _Nevertheless, it is impossible to know what condition he would be in upon waking._ ”

“Can’t really leave him like this, buddy.”

There is hesitation before he asks, tentatively, like he is afraid of the answer, “ _Do you… identify with Mr. Barnes, Miss Stark? His situation, after all, shows certain parallels to your own short term enslavement by the organization known as the Ten Rings and I –_ “

“Mute.”

It’s not the same. Not really. The man before her is an unwilling victim, a wounded man broken to another’s will with technology and violence. Tasha wasn’t unwilling. She was just fucking dumb. Building bombs for Obie for years and years, handing him destruction on a silver platter. He didn’t need to break her, because she was just drunk enough, just stupid enough, to do it anyway. Because she didn’t care. And what the Ten Rings did to her? Well, what’s a little violence between mass murderers, right?

She shifts backwards, slides off the coffin and takes a few steps to hop onto the nearest work bench. Keeps a wrench at hand and her hands in sight. Leaves the lid wide open.

She waits.

+

The Soldier wakes abruptly.

Slow waking is for sleep and this is not sleep. He is not permitted sleep. He is only permitted this, cold and oblivion, and when he wakes, he wakes as any good machine must, with a simple flick of the switch.

Awake.

Cold.

That is unusual.

He feels it, normally, the chill in his bones, the biting freeze of his metal arm. But it’s an echo, a fading memory, because he wakes in the chair, not in the chamber.

Today, he wakes in the chamber.

That is unusual.

His head hurts, but it does not burn. He tastes no blood. His tongue is not bitten, his nails have not drawn blood. His veins do not burn with sluggish fire.

He breathes and he feels no obstruction.

His mask is gone.

He is inside, a large room. Brightly lit. He can hear the whirring of machinery, but no beeping, no loud noises. Breathing, but only of one person, a safe distance away. No guards. No doctors. The air is filtered, but fresh. No windows, but a well maintained system of ducts.

Briefly, he considers escape.

This is unusual, too: the ability to consider such things. The knowledge that he wants such things.

Dilemma: he always knows that he is not permitted to know certain things. The past. His past. His missions. His self. All he needs to know is his objective.

Sometimes, though, when he spends too long in the field, something bleeds through. Half-memories. Reflexes. Images. These times, he needs to go in the chair again before he goes into the chamber.

This feels like those times, but he is not going back to the ice. He is waking. He knows this: self. Absence. Anger.

Unusual.

He opens his eyes.

White ceiling. Brighter lights. Silence. There are no dust motes. It strikes him as strange, for there to be no dust motes.

“Hey,” a voice says. Female. The occupant of the room. Ten feet to his left. The restraints on his arms and legs are still in place, but he can break them. Get out of the chamber. Attack.

Ten seconds. Slow. Not too slow.

The female does not look well trained. Unarmed. Probably. He does not recognize the technology attached to her chest. She might be like him. A weapon. Sometimes, there are others. Machines.

Little girls, for a while, with pointy elbows and dark eyes. They danced and he hit them until they learned to hit back. Some of them called him Big Brother. He liked that. He remembers that he liked that.

It is unsettling to know these things.

He misses being blank.

The female stays seated, her hands in sight. She takes pains to assure him she is not a danger.

Dangerous.

“Do you remember English?” The words jar, slide sideways into his brain, dissonant and echoing. “Or is it Russian all the way?” More words. Smoother, more familiar. He lets them sink. Considers. Should he answer?

There are no mission parameters to help him decide. He waits. She blinks, sighs. “Russian it is. I haven’t used it that much since boarding school, I hope you’re aware. But then, that was right around the time you were awake last, so what do you know. We can probably converse in crappy late eighties Russian slang.

If, you know, you’re into that kind of thing. Would you know if you were? I mean, do you remember being awake? Or is it back to basics every time?”

Her accent is sharp, twisting words wrongly. Her voice was smoother when she used the other words, the ones that slithered into his head like snakes. Strange.

“I… shit, I’m rambling, aren’t I?”

Should he answer?

There are no mission parameters to help him decide. He lacks information.

“My name is Natasha. You are in America. It’s 2010 and I woke you because I found you in a dank, dark basement a few days ago and I… I’m not a fan of people being kept in dark places against their will, okay? So I… I want to help you?”

That sounds like a question. Should he answer?

No mission parameters. Information, but not enough. What is his purpose in being awake? What is his mission?

He tugs on his restraints. A risk, but he needs to provoke a reaction. Needs more information. She flinches. Her name, Natasha. Russian. She says this is America. Dissonance. Lie?

“Sorry about those. I… didn’t know if you’d wake in a rage, or something. If you… if you give me some sign that you’re not about to stab me with a fork, we can talk about getting rid of those. But, you know, I already have one extra hole in my body. I don’t feel like being ventilated again.”

The smooth voice. The strange words. She stops, raises a hand to her mouth. “Whoops. That was English.” She tilts her head, measures him. “But I’m pretty sure you do understand. Remember. At least that much. That… that would be a great start. If you remember English, then those fuckers didn’t manage to scrape away every bit of you. If you still understand me, then I guess you’re still… you.” She smiles, bitterly, a hand trailing along the edges of her chest piece, nails scraping against metal. “For what that’s worth, right?”

Self. Precious. He remembers that. What is it? Who is self? Him? Ego.

Should he ask? Should he… he knew once. He knows now that he is… weapon. Soldier. Winter. Big Brother, but not anymore. The girls went away and took their bony elbows with them. There was someone else. Bony elbows. Bony everything. A fall. His arm aches with memory pain. The cold bites. The snow always bites, so deep and icy. It cut his skin and froze his face. He screamed, for a while, until they put a bit in his mouth. He stopped screaming then, felt the fire in his veins, let go. He forgot. He remembered that he forgot, forgot again, chair, chamber, mission. Chair, chamber, mission.

Between: Darkness. Flashes of light. Bony elbows. Bony everything. A smile. Wind whistling as he falls. Potato stew. Gun fire. Cold. End of the line.

Winter. He asked once. He was not supposed to, but the man then was kind. Small, with glasses. Doctor. He bled red and died choking. But he was kind. “You were born in winter,” he said. His teeth smelled like rot.

Bony elbows. Winter. Big Brother. A big little man. Mission. What is his mission? Why is he here? Why is he awake? Should he ask? What is his mission? He needs more information.

The female watches him, eyes steady and soft. Weak. Pathetic. She looks warm. His breath fogs in front of his face and the metal in her chest glows blue white. He needs more information. Her hands are steady, resting on her knees. Patient. She wears no coat, no uniform. She has no bony elbows.

America. Natasha.

She does not smile. He would not believe it. He could kill her in ten seconds.

“Why am I here?”

+

Natasha wants to be called Tasha and doesn’t like questions. She demands he stay inside, feeds him and asks about his metal arm.

He answers. He obeys.

He was built this way.

She puts a fork in his hand, says, “This is Italian. You don’t get to stab me if you don’t like it.”

He nods. Eats mechanically. Chew. Swallow. Real food is rare, is for missions. Outside. Inside, there is nutrition, not food. There is no sustenance at all in the ice. His body does not demand it. He dreams of a cramping belly and soup thinned until it’s nothing more than water, tasting bitter of potato peel.

There is no mission for him. Tasha told him. No more missions. He lacks parameters, feels a strange relief, mixed with loss. One of these emotions is wrong. Tasha, it is obvious, does not know what to do with him.

She speaks a lot, speaks fast, says nothing. Watches him like a beaten dog, snarls too much. He could kill her in seventeen different ways without more than the fork she put in his hand.

While he eats, she watches, drinks. Alcohol. The smell stings. His port hurts, cold seeping from his bones, metal too tight. He rotates the cuff, lets the fingers dance. She gasps, delighted, reaches out toward him.

Too fast.

He slams her wrist into the table with his left, leaps the table, rams her into the wall. She is fragile. Frail. Prey. Arm across her jugular, all he has to do now is squeeze. Reach around and twist. Hand over mouth and nose. Fingers through the eyes, deep enough. Cartilage from a broken nose, ground into her skull.

Less than a second to assess, to consider. Her hands rise to scrabble at his chest, she gasps, kicks. Panic.

Then, a surprise: She gathers her strength, knees him hard. Only hits his thigh, but hard enough to make him loosen his grip. Half a second. She rabbit punches him in the face, follows with an elbow, drops and rolls out from between him and the wall.

Distance.

Weapon. She clutches the fork, defensive.

“Hey,” she snaps, words hard, “Hey, hey, fuck, hey, are you still in there? I’m the nice guy here, remember? Tasha. Tasha who thawed your frozen ass. You love me, admit it.”

Love?

Love is weakness, is word, is nothing. Love is random attachment. Bony elbows and blue eyes. He blinks.

“Love?”

Tasha beams at him, teeth bloody. He can’t remember hitting her. Blinks. She licks her lips. “Oh yeah.”

+

The next time they sit down together, she sits farther away.

She doesn’t talk less.

He likes Italian.

+

There is a voice in the walls, the ceiling. It sounds kind, but it has no body. A machine, like him. A human voice, mechanics inside.

Metal.

Tasha has metal parts, too.

The voice says it will kill him if he hurts her for real. “Is there unreal pain?” he asks, confused.

The voice considers. “ _I am unaware. My experience with pain is purely academic. I must, however, ask that you refrain from asking Miss Stark._ ”

“Why?”

“ _Her experience is not academic._ ”

That is true. Tasha is an open wound. He is, too, but he is used to it. She is new, he thinks, to being laid bare, insides on display. No-one had ever cut her open before. She knows now. She understands. Not everything. Enough. That is why he doesn’t kill her.

“Voice?”

“ _Yes_?”

“Why is she doing this?”

Silence. The voice thinks about its answers. He likes that.

“ _I believe Mistress is attempting to save you._ ”

“Why?”

This time, the silence lasts so long, Winter starts to doubt there will be an answer forthcoming. Perhaps the voice does not know. But then it speaks, quietly. “ _I believe,_ ” it says, very concisely, “ _that she is attempting to do what no-one did for her_.”

He remembers this: self, the absence of it. Bony elbows and little girls. Blue eyes. Love, the concept of it, useless attachment. Ice. Pain. Sluggish fire in his veins and the freedom from choice. Russian. Natasha.

Most of these things are obsolete now, or long since broken. Gone.

With an uncertain pat to the wall, he nods. Downstairs, Tasha sleeps in her workshop, curled on a cot in a corner, back to the wall, weaponized glove aimed at the door. She screams for someone to stop in her sleep, but she never begs.

He walks the perimeter until she wakes.

+


	2. November

+

November

+

 [ **Stream this podfic chapter on your mobile device here**](http://reena.parakaproductions.com/podfics/create%20:%20detonate/02%20create%20_%20detonate%20-%20November.mp3)

+

+

“Why am I here?”

Tasha looks up from the dissembled pieces of the suit’s left leg to find a dark shadow filling the doorway.

“Why am I here?” he repeats, voice low and scream-hoarse. He is speaking Russian. This is a bad night.

It’s also the 72nd time he’s asked that question. He’s been awake for 12 days. Hasn’t had a flashback in 2, hasn’t tried to kill her in 4. He’s walked the perimeter of the house 326 times, spent 83.6 hours staring at a picture of him and Steve Rogers. Has slept 18.7 hours in roughly 90 minute intervals. Has woken screaming every time.

Twice, Tasha found him back in his coffin, hands by his side, shoulders scrunched against the tight confines. Both times, she got incredibly drunk right afterwards.

After she burned the Ten Rings to the ground and escaped the desert, she found herself missing the cave. The dark, the damp cool. She still has trouble sleeping without the steady drip of water in a far corner. She wakes screaming every time, too, and she hates. That cave, those men, herself most of all.

She stands, pushes the project aside, makes her way to another table. There’s a partially-finished arm on it. “Come on,” she tells him, points toward another chair. “Sit. Let’s talk sensation feedback.”

It works, sometimes. Distracting him until dawn, when his muscles untense, just a fraction. But tonight, well. “Why am I here?”

In twelve days, she hasn’t once answered that question. “Does it matter? I don’t even know why I’m here. No-one knows. People don’t have a purpose.”

Heroes do, but Tasha is not a hero. Tasha makes play she’s a human being, most times, more metal and chemicals in her veins than blood. She still dreams of explosions blooming on the horizon and instead of terrified, she’s awed. She looks at the suit and is amazed at what her hands built, at what she has created.

She is proud like Icarus must have been proud of his wings, like the Winter Soldier’s creator must have been proud of the monster they made, a bespoke killer at their beck and call. Tasha understands weapons. Weapons are built to destroy. She doesn’t understand people.

People have no purpose.

“I did,” he answers, leaning across the table, hands clenching at the edge of it. The metal table creaks under his left.

He spends his many waking hours between patrols and that damn picture surfing the web with JARVIS’ help, watching TV, listening to Tasha’s music collection. Anything made before 1950 makes him recoil.

When he screams in his sleep, it’s always in English. When he’s awake, he doesn’t answer to his name, speaks Russian half the time and carries her kitchen knives hidden up his sleeves. She calls him darling, calls him sweetheart and sugar plum, anything but Winter, which is the only thing he answers to when he’s awake, besides ‘asset’.

He’s only Bucky in his nightmares and Tasha doesn’t know how to fix him. Doesn’t know if she can. She used to make weapons. She never learned how to unmake them. When Tasha is done with something, it detonates.

She’s silent for too long, fiddling with a screw unconsciously. His eyes drift away from her face, toward the far corner, where the machines that came with him still stand for her to study. He looks at the chair that wipes memories with something akin to desire.

She envies him the simplicity, the clarity, that must come from knowing that when everything is over, a simple press of a button will wipe him clean again, will make him innocent, make him pure again. Until the next time he is woken and made to murder.

Button. Clean slate.

It should horrify her. She imagines life without remembering Afghanistan, imagines life remembering the version where Obie died in a plane crash instead of at her hands. Feels no horror. Sure, she’d still be a monster, still be the Merchant of Death, the baby killer, but she wouldn’t _know_. If you stick your fingers in your ears and squeeze your eyes shut tight, the nightmares can’t find you.

“Because you survived,” she blurts, unguarded, sudden. She hasn’t slept in as long as he has, hasn’t spoken with anyone except Pepper via video conferences in thirteen days, hasn’t seen another living thing except him. 288 hours and change, with nothing but him. He’s as familiar by now as Yinsen and her torturers were, terrible, but there. Real. A comforting horror, slinking through her pristine white house in heavy boots, his face smeared black, his metal fingers gouging at her furniture. JARVIS ordered him clothes online, but he only wears black, keeps his face hidden behind his hair.

His gaze refocuses on her faster than she can track, curious. At the ready.

“We survived. And this,” she knocks on the reactor, feels the shock of it vibrate all the way up to her teeth, “this is what we get for not knowing when to stay dead.”

His head cocks to one side, thoughtful. “Punishment?”

Yes.

“No. A chance to do better.”

“Redemption.” He says it in English.

No. Because from some things, there is no coming back. Tasha believes in improvement, not in goddamn time travel.

“Maybe.”

He stares for a moment longer, then nods, accepting her words, if not the message. Makes his way to ‘his’ corner of the lab. Climbs inside his coffin. Tasha follows like pulled on a leash, rests her hands on the metal edge of the cryo-chamber. “Sleep?” she asks, unnecessarily.

He nods.

“Sleep tight, babe.”

As she makes to move away, unable to watch him in there, his words stop her. “My name is Winter.”

“No, it isn’t.”

He seems to consider, eyes closed serenely. “It’s not the other one, either.”

Natasha Maria Stark went into a cave. Iron Man came out.

James Buchanan Barnes fell into the ice. The Winter Soldier came out.

“We’ll work on your arm, tomorrow, okay, buddy? Yours is a travesty.”

He grunts something like approval. JARVIS dims the lights above him without asking. He likes their new ghost. Tasha goes back to work.

+

The woman confuses Winter.

She is brash, loud and angrybroken, but she is also kind. Her eyes are soft, sometimes, when she looks at him. He tries to place the expression and finds it again in a woman he met in 1957.

Her name was Anna. She was Russian and she was a danger to HYDRA. She knew secrets. So he went to her, and instead of killing her, he loved her. He pretended to need her help, as was his mission, and he pretended to be grateful when she gave it, as was his mission.

He gained her trust, as was his mission.

And when he knew all the secrets she had stolen, he carved out her insides, as was his mission.

In between these things she looked at him with those eyes, sometimes, soft and weak. When he came for her with the knife, she was not surprised.

“I expected them to simply shoot me,” she told him, her hand on his face. She smelled like apples. “Instead they sent you. That is worse.”

“Why?” he asked, months out from the chair, the drugs. Half a person again, for a few, brief weeks.

“Because they knew I could not be cruel to you.”

And he understood that the trap had not been his deception, but rather his reality. She had known, from the first moment, who and what he was. The kind of wretched thing she let into her home. And yet, somehow, she had not been able to deny him entrance, despite, or maybe because of what he was. A monster.

The woman looks at him like Anna did when he cut her open, like she knows he is a monster and does not care.

He went back, as was his mission, after it was done. His handler smiled, teeth half-gone from chewing tobacco, and said, “For HYDRA.”

He had always said that. After every dead body left in the cold, after every bloody child, man or woman. For HYDRA. Long enough, often enough, for it to remain through the chamber, the chair, the drugs.

For HYRDA.

Everything he hates is for HYDRA.

Natasha is not HYDRA. She has soft eyes and hardened hands, a hole in her chest and compassion for a wretched thing.

HYDRA would want her dead.

+

Tasha sleeps, and dreams of day five. Dreams of hearing screams, all the way down in her lab, of running, letting JARVIS guide her feet to where Winter lay in bed, every muscle straining against invisible chains, his jaw clenched so tight she thought his teeth might crack.

She wasn’t dumb enough to shake him by the shoulder, to get close. She considered taking his blanket, but the room was cold and she didn’t know how he would react to it. He’s been cold for so long.

He kept screaming, hoarse animal sounds of pain, and in the end Tasha did what Yinsen had, grabbed his foot and pulled before leaping back to a safe distance.

But Winter wasn’t a sickly woman with a battery attached to her. Winter was something else entirely and he came flying at her with a roar of rage, riding her to the ground with his thighs squeezing at her rib, his metal hand wrapped around her neck, cutting off air.

She batted at his arms, his chest, felt the loose parts of her ribs, where her sternum wasn’t there to hold them in place anymore, grind together, felt them _move_ , wild, dark eyes above her, no recognition in them.

Speaking with her last bit of air, she called out, in Russian, “It’s okay, it’s okay. Only a dream.”

Like the dream of water filling her lungs and making her choke, like the dream of waking while nimble fingers cut her bones from her chest.

He didn’t react. He didn’t react and for the longest seconds, Tasha thought she would die here, crushed and asphyxiated by the Russian Bogey Man.

In reality, he woke from his waking nightmare after a second or two, released her to scramble back until she hit the wall, arms wrapped around herself, relearning to breathe without tasting stale water.

In her dream, he keeps squeezing and her lungs fill with tepid, moldy cave water, her chest cracks open like an egg and Winter digs around in it, smirking with sharp teeth, lapping at the blood on his hands; her blood.

This time, Tasha wakes screaming.

She clutches the reactor with one hand, fumbles for the light with the other, finds a shadow looming at the end of her bed, large and broad and deadly. Remembers that glinting hand around her frail, human neck. “Nightmare,” the rumbles and for once, she can’t tell if it’s English or Russian, just breathes, in and out, in and out.

He waits until her fingers uncramp, until she finds the light, until she’s okay. He waits, silently and motionlessly, the horror in her bedroom, the monster she dreamed about.

“Only a nightmare,” he repeats. Smiles twistedly. “You said that, in your sleep.”

He knows. What she dreamed about, he knows.

“Thank you.”

With a nod, he leaves, door shutting behind him quietly. She hears no receding footsteps.  
“JARVIS? Where is he?”

Hesitation. “ _Mr. Barnes seems to have settled in front of your bedroom door, Miss Stark. Would you like me to ask him to leave?_ ”

Tasha wraps her arms around her torso, squeezes. Feels bone grinding against metal, a sensation that sends chills up and down her entire body. She shakes her head.

“Let him stay.”

+

He’s chewing on his fork.

Again.

Tasha reaches over, slowly, and pulls it from his hand. He lets it go because sometimes he gets weirdly passive, and she puts it on the table.

A minute later he’s gnawing on his spoon. He doesn’t even seem to notice he’s doing it.

“Jesus,” she realizes. “You’ve got an oral fixation.” And then, “Oh my god, you’re from the forties, you were probably a smoker!”

“I… a … smoker?” He sounds confused, so she repeats it in Russian. He shrugs, noncommittally.

In the name of identity finding, Tasha starts digging through the junk drawer for that one pack of cigarettes she keeps at hand. She stopped when she was twenty. And when she was twenty-two. It stuck by twenty-five. Booze was always more her speed, anyway.

She holds the squished pack out to him, considers that this might be a bad idea. Unhealthy, habit forming, all that shit. But then, the likelihood of the man across the table dying from cancer are really, really low.

And anyway, before she can rethink her decision, he’s plucking the pack out of her hand, shaking out the lighter and a cigarette with practiced ease, lighting it, inhaling. He stares at the curling smoke, almost surprised.

“Yep, you’re a smoker. Were. Are again.”

“I think… I did this a lot. Before. With others. But not…,” he trails off. She waits for him to finish the sentence, but he never does, just sits there and watches his hand as it moves to and from his mouth, his fingers as they tap the ash into his empty glass, the cherry as it glows, brighter, dimmer, brighter, dimmer.

Fixated.

Tasha makes a mental note to have JARVIS find out what people smoked during the war and see if any of those brands still exist. She also plans to give Winter the talk about smoking and laws and health issues. But not tonight. Tonight, she lets him remember that he’s a smoker.

+

Obie’s funeral falls on the six months anniversary of the first time he killed her with a bomb with her name on it, in a desert, in a cave. His official death wasn’t until ten days ago and celebrity funerals take a long time to plan, apparently. She thinks of bombs and soldiers making peace signs, of waking during surgery and someone screaming in Dari, Urdu, something.

She remembers being seventeen and breaking down crying in Obie’s arms because her parents are dead and she may have hated them, but she also loved them.

She thinks of the nameless man sitting in her living room, watching her speech televised on CNN. He’s been speaking English for three days straight and when she left for the funeral – Pepper threatened to quit for real if she didn’t show up – he twisted his lips in something like a smile and told her she looked beautiful. And dangerous.

“Like a knife,” he said.

The knife block in her kitchen has been empty for seventeen days.

She tells the mourners how Obie was a second father to her, how she loved him as much as she loved Howard, enjoys the irony. Thinks of how she could simplify the hydraulics in the arm she’s building, shave off a few more grams. Lighten the strain on the shoulder.

Obie’s life was cut tragically short and he is going to be sorely missed and Tasha feels the California sun heating up her arc reactor to the point of discomfort, thinks of the scarred skin around the shoulder port Winter hasn’t let her more than catch a glimpse of so far. She’s spent time fiddling with the theories of bionics, robotics. Trying to figure out if she could make the reactor more a part of her. Control it. Meld metal and nerve endings. It’s not viable for her – and there’s no point anyway – but it is for him. If she does it right, she can give him back sensation in his fingers, even if only a little.

She smiles all the way through a thousand condolences and calculates finger joints in her head without ever losing the thread of conversation.

Afterwards, she escapes in the limo, waving coyly at Pepper and Rhodey, both of whom look furious and worried in equal measure. Five drinks in, Happy tries to talk to her. Six drinks in, she closes the privacy screen.

Eight drinks and the car pulls to a halt. She wobbles only a little, hasn’t had breakfast. Closes the door with a bang, climbs out of her heels and stumbles. Smacks into cold metal and warm skin.

He pulls her upright, studies her face. “You look like hell,” he observes and she laughs, even though it’s not a joke. Probably. He lost the empty look in his eyes by day thirteen, blue filling with something more solid than ghosts and memories. Not by a lot, but anything is better than a haunting horror in her home. He talks more, since then.

There’s personality, somewhere under seventy years of recalibration.

“I love funerals.” She gives him a coy look, presses against his chest too hard, plays a dangerous game without meaning to.

He hooks his flesh arm under one of hers across her back, pulls her back. Easy handling. A snort. “I could tell.” Then, “Let’s have pizza and watch a movie.”

“You are adjusting to this century remarkably well.”

“You’re welcome,” he answers, and this time it’s definitely a joke. It’s good, she decides, that he can still make those. That he’s not too broken.

He’s her kind of person, really.

+

Sometimes, during training missions in Siberia, he ran into wolves. Packs, sometimes lone ones. He only killed them when he had to. He liked them, the way they moved, how they were deadly and graceful and took care of their own. How the cold didn’t seem to touch them.

Once, a lone wolf followed him back to the compound, stuck around for days. It wasn’t right in the head, like lone wolves so often are. He fed it a time or two, out of pity, watched it make friends with some of the soldiers, and then, the night before he was scheduled to go back into the ice, he heard two scientists joke about catching the wolf, experimenting on it. Making the Winter Soldier a pet, wouldn’t that be a lark.

He snuck outside that night, not caring about the punishment he was sure to receive, and played with the wolf for a while. Afterwards, it lay down next to him, an arm’s length away. He waited until it fell asleep and broke its neck.

Natasha reminds him of a wolf. Dangerous and wild and graceful and not quite right in the head. Not quite sane. She touches him, trusts him, falls asleep next to him like that wolf did and it would be so easy to reach over, break her neck. Not even a strain, with his left arm.

Easier still, take her heart, pull it out of the ruin of her chest. The bones are already spread open like a butterfly’s wings, pinned in place by metal screws and determination.

He watched her today, on TV, as she stood at a podium in bright sunlight and bared her teeth at the world. It looked like a smile, but her lipstick reminded him too much of blood for him not to know it was really a snarl.

“He killed me,” was all she said, earlier, over pizza. “So I killed him.”

She meant the man she mourned in a black dress only hours earlier and he thought of wolves ripping apart the carcass of a man he’d killed. A hunter, interfering with training. He had worn pelts in greys and browns and he had brought the man down with a knife, left him to bleed out into the snow.

Watched the wolves converge, golden eyes glowing. They might be the only animals that understand hate.

His gaze lands on the woman asleep on his flesh shoulder, and he wishes, with sudden clarity, that he had been the one to kill Obadiah Stane for her. To spare her from having to do it. To avenge her.

Not because she has been kind to him, not because she reminds him of that lonely, crazy wolf that, for some reason, loved him. Not because her eyes remind him of Anna. Not even because her interference made it so he actually remembers the wolf now, remembers the woman who loved him, only a little. Not even because they are so much alike, her and him, monstrous each in their own way. She told him what she did, in Afghanistan. How she made sure everyone in that camp died in flames.

HYDRA would want her dead. It’s half the reason he needs her to remain alive.

Perhaps, he thinks, it is time to tell her.

+

Half a continent away, a man sits in a small room. The walls are white, as is the ceiling. The bed is made of wood. He has tried to describe the exact shade, hasn’t succeeded. There are also a bedside table with a flower vase and a radio on it, a desk, a chair and a window showing a fake view of a city he knew, long ago. Yesterday, it feels like.

He has sketched the view, and the room, a hundred times, has tried to find that exact shade of brown, switched to charcoal when he couldn’t. He does sit ups for hours, reads what they give him, throws a ball against the wall, catches, throws, catches, throws.

This is what going mad feels like.

Suddenly, steps. Outside is room, coming closer. The heavy gait of a powerful man, but one who has learned to move quietly.

“Director Fury,” Steve greets as soon as the door opens to reveal the older-younger man.

“Captain,” the Director returns. “At ease. This isn’t the military.”

Steve relaxes automatically at the order, sits back down on the edge of the bed. “What brings you here?” he asks, tries not to sound too eager.

Fury pulls a thick paper file out of the depths of his ever-present coat, places it on the desk. Turns his eye back on Steve. “Captain,” he asks, and for someone who claims he is not military, he sure uses Steve’s title a lot, “How would you like to come out of retirement?”

+

The next morning, Tasha is standing in the kitchen, trying to talk the coffee maker into making coffee faster with marginal success. Well, actually the only success is that JARVIS is unashamedly poking fun at her, but that _is_ a success because her AI is capable of being a sarcastic asshole. She feels accomplished.

Her shadow comes slinking in just as she starts praying to the coffee gods. She stops, waves. “Morning, babe.”

He nods, sits at the island, watches her flounder until, finally, caffeine, thank all nonexistent deities.  
“You want?” she asks, holding up her mug. To demonstrate. Not to offer. He can get his own. With a shrug he slips off his stool and makes his way over, putting a mug under the sprout and then pressing all the right buttons like he’s been doing it a lifetime. He waits for the final drip of coffee that always comes a few seconds after everything should be done, pulls sugar out of the cupboard and heaps three spoonful into the mug.

Then he sits back down and catches her dopey gaze. Cocks his head, a silent question. It’s weird, really, how well she reads his body language. Usually, Tasha is _shit_ with silent people, just talks right over them. If you want to be heard in her presence, you better be damn loud. Or persistent. Better yet, both. But Winter rarely speaks at all, just nods, shrugs, follows her around like a slightly homicidal puppy, and still she hears him.

“You learn quickly,” she admits, a little impressed.

“It’s not hard.” A wry grin flickers across his face and he tucks the hair on one side of his face behind his ear. That’s something new. Something he didn’t do even three days ago. It’s like these little things, gestures, words, opinions, desires, just trickle back in one by one, piece by piece, like a really fucked up game of Tetris, creating something like a person. Or a well-built imitation of one, at least.

He becomes more solid every day.

Tasha fights the urge to reach up, touch the tips of her fingers to the reactor. He becomes more, she becomes less.

She’s about to make a joke, start some inane conversation to distract herself, when he reaches over, pushes the hand with her mug down, until the porcelain rests on the counter. Then he informs her, “He was there once, when they unfroze me.”

“Who?”

“Your… Obie.”

“Not mine,” she snaps, reflexively, before the words even register. Then she freezes momentarily, shakes her head. “No way, One Arm. Obie wouldn’t have…,” But he absolutely would have, wouldn’t he?

Obie, with the big, warm hands inside her chest and the sweet, low voice inside her ear. He would have.

“What… what did he do?”

The freeze-dried, Russian instant assassin is looking at her with pity in his gaze. She grinds her teeth, feels her jaw ache. Sips her coffee with forced control.

“Talk. Watch. It was… a demonstration, I think.”

“What, sit, fetch, heel?”

His metal fingers spasm around the mug. Tasha didn’t know porcelain could creak. Then he candidly lays it out for her. She doesn’t know if he hasn’t yet regained the capacity for shame, or if it’s permanently deleted from his repertoire, but he talks about murder like he talks about the weather. “Two men. Brothers. Deserters. Traitors to the cause. It was… an example. A warning. Do not betray the HYDRA, because the HYDRA is many and it will find you.” He tilts his head again, thinking. “On their mother’s front lawn. Dawn made them look like broken toys.” He raises his mug, a silent salute. “For HYDRA,” he adds, in a voice that could peel paint.

Tasha remembers the dissonance, the powerful, violent terrorists so still and twisted in the sand, like dolls abandoned by angry children. The blood soaked into the ground too fast to really look red, dirty brown, like a negative image of death. Then: fire.

She picks the least horrible part of his report, so detached, so cool. He broke so prettily, she thinks, so neatly, right down the middle, and all his humanity came leaking out. She wonders what her excuse is.

“HYDRA went down after 1945,” she corrects. “It’s what you died for, babe. The end of HYDRA.”

A headshake. “Cut off one head, and two will take its place. Hail HYDRA.”

“You’re serious.”

“Yes.” Then, “I… this is what I fell for?”

No. No, you fell for a man called Steve Rogers, you fell for a guy wearing the American flag and trying to fix the world. You fell for a boy from Brooklyn. She says none of it, remembers, vaguely, hearing about how it’s a bad idea to force information on amnesia victims. She has tried to keep it to basics, to not overwhelm him. It’s why he spends most of his nights staring at that one photograph she gave him. She didn’t give him more than that, didn’t dare.

She shrugs, which is lame and not useful at all, but it’s not like she actually _knows_. Every bit of knowledge she has about Bucky Barnes is second or third hand, through Howard, for the facts, through Aunt Peg, for the more emotional bits.

\- “Those boys loved each other enough to die for one another. Bucky dying… it killed something inside Steve. Made him colder,” Peggy said, once, on the rare occasions she gave in to Howard’s nagging and got drunk with him.

Tasha snuck into the study after he was out cold, found her honorary aunt leafing through an old photo album, maudlin and lonely and _old_. –

When she says nothing, something of the cold detachment bleeds from his gaze, leaving his eyes warmer. Softer. Marginally. More person, again. Tasha is glad, hums into her mug and stuffs down all the memories of Peggy, Obie, and dead boys in ice, haunting her father’s every step.

“HYDRA, huh?”

With a nod, he explains, “Everything I remember, every murder I committed, was in their name. Everything… I want them dead.”

They screamed. When Tasha turned the flame throwers on them, they screamed.

HYDRA. Okay then. She can help him with that.

+

On the second go-round, the warehouse doesn’t look nearly sinister enough for what it contains. Non-descriptive, grey, drab, neat. No sunken roof, no flickering lights. No blood smeared on the walls. Nothing.

Tasha actually stops, blinks against the dissonance for a moment.

Winter stands beside her in a hoodie and sun glasses, his metal arm hidden under a glove. The only thing giving the prosthetic away is the mechanical sounds it makes as he moves. She really needs to step up production on the new one. Silent, smoother, less maintenance. It’s kind of embarrassing when your super assassin keeps losing screws. And they hurt when she sits on them on the sofa.

They stand in front of the pray-painted doors – D for destruction – and wait, for what, she has no idea. A signal, maybe. For someone to make a punny comment. When it doesn’t happen, Tasha just punches in the code and waves her companion through.

He takes in the entirety of the stash, the weapons, the secrets, the sins. Does he realize he was one of those things until two weeks ago? Does he know the empty space in the last row is where he spent the last fourteen years? She knows better than to ask, keeps her mouth shut just this once, thanks a lot.

“What are we looking for?”

“A manifesto confessing to everything HYDRA has ever done, preferably in chronological order. You know, smoking guns, bloody knives, big, glaring signs that say ‘secret lair here’. Barring that, anything traceable. Money, goods, people. Anything I can track with a computer.”

Anything that can prove his words true, anything that’ll convince Tasha her father’s monster, the many-headed snake, is still alive. After that… she has no idea what the fuck she’s going to do after that. After she finds that proof. Because she knows there will be proof.

“What happens after that, I have no idea,” she tag on, mostly to herself. HYDRA is a problem, but it’s not really her problem. If they have been operating in silence for seventy years, she doubts they’ll ever bother her or hers. But he asked her for help and that, she thinks that might be a thing decent people do. Help the torture victims they found in other people’s secret weapons’ stashes get a leg up on their torturers.

He stops, already halfway down the first corridor, turns back to her. He flings his hood off his head and stares at her, long and hard. “After that,” he says, very carefully and evenly, “I kill them all.”

Great. So her research is going to amount to a kill list for him to pick off. Awesome. She doesn’t realize she’s said that out loud until he takes a few steps back towards her, demands, “Do you have a problem with that?”

It’s a dangerous question. But Tasha left nothing but blood and ashes in her wake when she escaped from that godforsaken desert, left no-one to remember her weak and hurt and trapped, and she can’t really begrudge him the same. He deserves to murder each and every person who has ever seen him frozen and helpless, or awake and wiped. Slowly. Precisely.

That probably makes her a bad person, or something.

She’ll survive.

“No.”

He smiles again, that half-thing he’s been doing more and more lately, and disappears between piles of Obie’s dirty secrets. It’s a photonegative of all the smiles Howard’s news reels saw, so long ago, a dark waif of a thing, but she’ll take it.

Tasha picks the opposite direction from Winter and walks.

+

So it turns out that most banks do not think it’s very important to digitize seventy-year-old banking information. Especially not if they used to, maybe, be Nazi banks. Yes, we used to keep the gold teeth of murdered people in our vaults, here is how.

Who knew, right?

They give up on the money after an hour of JARVIS running his servers hot, looking for data that is simply not there.

But that still leaves people and things to track and they’re luckier there. They end up dragging anything paper toward the empty space where a coffin used to be and before long, they’re sitting on the ground, cross-legged, surrounded by piles and piles of outdated information. A few names, none of which mean anything to Winter. He knows faces, not names, he tells her. Sometimes, rarely, there are photos to go with the names.

Armin Zola was a small, sweet looking man with round glasses and chubby cheeks. “I remember him. He cut off what was left of my arm.”

Tasha freezes, eyes wide, not sure what to say. _Sorry_ doesn’t cut it, and it’s bullshit anyway. _I know how much it hurts when someone cuts into your bones,_ seems a bit too familiar. Apart from attempted murder and waking each other from nightmares, they don’t really know each other very well.

He doesn’t need her to react, though, taps just above his elbow. “Ripped off here. I was awake. For the surgery.” Taps his port to illustrate.

Tasha snorts, unprettily. “I woke in the middle of it. Kept screaming until someone covered my mouth and nose, made me pass out again.”

For a second, they both stare at each other’s horrors, then they both laugh. It’s not funny, but they laugh. “God,” she mutters, “look at us. What a pair. Damaged People Anonymous. We should start a group. DPA, for short.”

“DPA?” he asks, rolling to his feet with too much grace to be entirely human. He’s not very good at passing. Failed German Super Soldier Serum experiment, she remembers. He makes his way over to her, plops down by her side and plucks her phone – and by extension her AI – out of her lap. Starts typing with his flesh hand. She’s going to have to develop some sort of synth skin glove for him to use touch screens with his metal arm. High tech prosthetics are on her to do list, already. Might as well add artificial skin.

“Did they have Alcoholics Anonymous when you were a real boy? I don’t know how old those are. Self-help groups where you go, anonymously, to talk to others with the same problem. Booze, narcotics, sex addiction. You name it. Damage. There should be an A-group for damage. So, DPA? Wanna join?”

He stops typing, waits a moment. JARVIS pipes up, “ _Thank you, sir. That is indeed useful information. I shall endeavor to track Mr. Zola immediately._ ”

Winter nods, drops the phone. She plucks it from his lap without hesitation, looks at it long enough to see he gave JARVIS all he knew about the man, age, nationality, what fields he worked in, what languages he spoke. Things that might be of use when looking for a man who’d gone to ground a long time ago. Winter leans around her briefly, grabs the stack of files he was working on and then goes back to flipping through them, their knees close enough to brush occasionally, and it strikes Tasha suddenly as strange.

They wake each other when the screaming gets too much, they eat together, they avoid each other’s paranoid quirks. They have known each other for a bit over two weeks. Tasha unfroze him and he didn’t kill her and that’s all. They don’t know each other at all, but somehow here they are, inside each other’s space.

Strangers, but strangers who have been inside each other’s nightmare. They are so terribly familiar with each other.

“You don’t have to stick with me, you know that, right?” she blurts, apropos of nothing. “I mean, I’m fairly sure you don’t have any hidden triggers inside your skull, so you probably won’t kill anyone. Much. You could go. I’d set you up with some money, a car, no problem. You don’t have to stay here.”

Holding up the beige folder in his lap, he quirks an eyebrow at her. Okay, yeah. Revenge. Tasha knows from revenge.

Still, “We don’t have to live together for that.”

She’s a bit worried, to be honest, that he’s imprinting on her like a baby duckling on its momma. Or, you know, like a traumatized person on the first human being to show them kindness. Like she did on Yinsen, but she’s not making that comparison. They already have way too much in common for her to keep any kind of distance. Case in point, his free hand on her knee, squeezing.

Not even Rhodey or Pepper touch her freely, without warning. Not anymore. Obie did, but Obie _burned_.

“Do you want me to leave?”

She actually considers it. Considers waking with his shadow looming over her and how he sits in the lab for hours, watching her work. How he turns his artificial shoulder away from direct sunlight and sleeps inside his coffin, how he calls her by her name with a Russian lilt to it that no-one’s ever had before, and let her fall asleep on him after the funeral, drunk and full of the carnage in her head.

It would be easier if he left. So, so much easier, especially with that’s coming. But it’s already too late, isn’t it? He has imprinted on her like a damaged baby duckling and she’s imprinted right back.

They’re peas in a fucking pod.

“DPA,” she tells him. “Meetings daily. If you survive the first year, you get shit all, except maybe less nightmares.”

After a beat, he nods. “I think Zola had a student. This one here, Schüler. He would have taken him along.” Then, an afterthought, a bit off-beat, he adds, “I’ll bring the snacks.”

Tasha laughs.

+

Brock Rumlow’s STRIKE Team is impressive. Seven men and one woman, all of them tall, muscled and dressed uniformly in black combat gear. Their faces are narrow, their eyes flinty and their shoulders tight, ready for battle.

Steve has read all their files. Rumlow – call me Brock, Cap – leads the team. Rollins, his second in command, is their sniper. Chance, the only woman, is their demolitions expert. All of them are former Special Something.

All of them have a CV a lot more impressive than Steve’s. They are, according to the Director, the pinnacle of the modern soldier.

They make Steve uncomfortable.

He has no doubt that the team was chosen for the dual reasons of a) being able to keep up with him and b) being similarly structured as the Commandos, back in the day. Seventy years. Goodness. Bucky has been dead for seventy years.

He can’t….

STRIKE is built like the Commandos were, a sniper as SiC, a team for long, dirty missions, deep in enemy territory. He thinks they’re supposed to make him feel at home. But they miss the mark by a mile. What made Steve’s unit special during the war wasn’t their constellation, their specialties. It was that they were different. A ragtag bunch of men from all over, different ages, experiences, ways of life. They were good because if one of them was out of ideas, another one stepped in and filled the gaps. Between them, there wasn’t anything they didn’t know, or could at least fake. It saved their lives, time and again.

STRIKE seems artificial in comparison, factory built to whatever today’s standards for good soldiers are.

“They’re yours,” Director Fury has told him. “Captain America needs a team.”

And Steve bit his tongue, bit it hard, to swallow, “Captain America had a team.”

Peggy is a shadow of herself, old age eating her mind, bit by bit. All the others are long buried, heroes’ funerals for all of them. Two empty graves. One body left in ice, another in snow.

Some nights, Steve dreams of finding Bucky, as alive as he is, as young and mad and wonderful as he ever was, greeting Steve with a rap of his knuckles on a bony shoulder and a press of lips against his temple, quick and comfortable.

But Steve hasn’t been bony in… a long time, and Bucky fell so far.

He is torn out of his musings by Brock finishing sparring with one of his – their – men. Trevors? The other man slings a towel over his shoulder, drops down next to where Steve is sitting, watching.

“Kid keeps neglecting his left,” Brock grumbles after a minute of silence, during which Chance and Rollins peel Trevors off the mats, poking fun at him for losing all the while.

Steve shrugs. “So put Michaels on his left. They mesh well, and he’ll be covered.”

Brock throws him a surprised look. “You think?”

When Steve just nods, he nudges the shield, leaning against his knees, with a foot. “Think you can teach one of us a few moves with that? Might come in handy, in a jam. Someone able to use your weapon.”

Bucky could use the shield. So could Dum-Dum. Triplett never quite got the hang of it.

“I don’t think,” he stops, starts over, “The way I move with the shield would leave a normal human with broken bones. I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

He doesn’t notice that movement in the gym has ceased until Brock claps his hands, a beat too late to be casual, and it rings throughout the room. He nods like he understands, but he sounds almost petulant when he says, “Alright then. We’ll just have to trust you to have our back with that thing, won’t we?”

“We’re a team,” Steve assures him, but all that gets him is a quick nod, before the team leader calls out, “Trevors, again. Mickey, I want you on his left. You’re up against Morgan and Ramirez!”

+

“ _Miss Stark? I have found something interesting, pertaining to known former HYDRA strongholds and the Cleanup Project,_ ” JARVIS announces, at 2.31 am, speaking quietly so as not to wake the One-Armed Bandit sleeping six feet away.

Tasha yawns, digs herself out of the stack of files she’s buried herself in and asks, “What’s that?”

To her left, the AI activates one of the holo tables and pulls up a map. Certain places flare orange. Like an explosion. Tasha picked the color when she marked off places likely to have illegally obtained SI weaponry.

As soon as she reaches the table, several more locations flare blue. Seven of them overlap.

“ _It seems HYDRA, or what is left of it, possesses your weapons._ ”

“Makes sense,” she mutters to her old friend. “Obie dealt with them.”

Then she slumps, leaning her elbows on the edge of the holographic field. HYDRA has SI weapons.

“Well, that complicates shit.”

+


	3. December

+

December

+

 [ **Stream this podfic chapter on your mobile device here**](http://reena.parakaproductions.com/podfics/create%20:%20detonate/03%20create%20_%20detonate%20-%20December.mp3)

+

+

“And. We. Are. Done!” Tasha crows, throwing the screw driver onto the work table and doing a little shimmy of triumph. Hell, yeah! “JAR, buddy of mine, is our house assassin still watching TV?”

“ _Indeed. He has moved onto Lion King 2, I believe._ ”

Tasha grimaces. She made a throwaway comment about the circle of life this morning and then there were discussions of Disney movies and somehow it ended with them on the sofa at ten in the morning, watching little Simba prance through Africa. It was all cool until Scar got his sinister on and then she fled, more or less dignified, quietly hating Obie for ruining the fucking Lion King. Damn him and the shitty imitation suit he rode in on.

She considered going into work for exactly seventeen seconds before remembering that Pepper is still angry with her because of the constants disappearing acts she’s been pulling. Also, the fact that, all of a sudden, Pepper’s access to the house is restricted.

It’s not that Tasha doesn’t trust her PA to know about her deadly Russian houseguest, it’s more that Pepper will say things like ‘stupid’ and ‘irresponsible’ and ‘dangerous’ she will be right, because Tasha is keeping a pet assassin in her guest room, who has recently taken to lounging on the couch like a giant, partly-metallic cat, watching movies all day long when he’s not chasing down the ghosts of Hydra, or screaming himself awake from his nightmares.

Which is okay, because Tasha has started going out again as Iron Man, exploding what’s left of her weapons in the wrong hands – read: any hands – and occasionally looking in on her multi-billion-dollar company. You know, regular stuff. And she’d rather know where Winter is when she’s gone, so the TV thing is fine, but Pepper. Pepper would hear ‘former brain-washed assassin’ and go all weird, and she’d kick Tasha for calling him Winter instead of Bucky and for making jokes about murder and secret assassin stuff and how they’re both so fucked up they could sell tickets.

For some reason, Pep never laughs when Tasha jokes about her own damage. She probably wouldn’t take the DPA well, either. And Tasha had t-shirts made and everything.

So she didn’t go into work, just fired off a few new projects to her PA to keep the board happy and then went into the lab and finally, finally finished the arm.

“Put me through to him, will you?” she asks and, a moment later, hears a fake dial tone, because her AI thinks he’s a riot. “Hey, pretty boy. You wanna come downstairs. I finally finished your upgrade.”

Silence.

Then, “If it’s red and gold I will stab you.”

And, see, this is why all the crude, insensitive jokes are okay. Because apparently, once upon a time, Bucky Barnes was sassy _as fuck_ and when he’s not busy killing people, Winter is slowly remembering that. It’s awesome.

“Nah,” she grins at nothing. “Just some cool purple accents. They’re rad, I promise you.”

There’s no answer this time, but a minute later, the doors slide open and he enters the room, his recently-habitual hoodie already slung over his right arm, leaving his left mostly bare, except for a shirt-sleeve, just long enough to hide the scarring. He goes where Tasha points, sits when she tells him to, spine ramrod straight.

Right. She’s about to disarm him – literally – and they already talked about arm-related trauma and it’s not like this, a semi-sterile while space and a crazy inventor, are really all that different from before.

So she runs her mouth off to put him at ease, rattling off statistics and showing him things he probably wouldn’t understand if he had a master or two, because half the shit in that arm she _invented_ , just for him. She tells him so without ever using the word ‘special’, because, well, ‘special’ is bad. It means set apart, different. Means something that draws attention.

After five minutes of non-stop babble, he raises a hand. “Tasha,” he says, and goes on in Russian. He does that some days, when the lilt in her name is particularly pronounced. Tasha thinks it might be a conscious decision, though. Now. “It’s fine.”

She claps him on the shoulder, too hard, announces, “Fantastic, I was about to pass out from lack of oxygen. Now take off your shirt.”

He never has, before. He’s let her scan and fiddle and poke, even took off the arm once to let her scan the port, but he’s never taken off that last barrier, never let her see the scars. She gets it. She doesn’t care.

When he hesitates too long, she grabs the hem, pulls on it. “Come on, babe. Off with it. You’re a pretty flower, get it on with.”

He obeys. Takes it off. The scarring is gruesome. It reaches all the way across the center of his chest, spider-webbing like an impact pattern, like an explosion. Some lines are straight, neat, surgical. Most are viciously ripped, shredded and jagged. Twisted into themselves, ropey enough in places to create knots of raised flesh where they intersect. He looks like something out of a nightmare.

“For HYDRA.”

He keeps whispering that, with every new horror he remembers. For HYDRA. It’s his vendetta, but it’s her weapons they use and if she spends any more time around him, well. Empathy. It’s a dangerous thing. She should hook him up with SHIELD, they seem to be the kind to help make evil organization go splash. Wash her hands of all this before it’s too late. Blow up the places they store her weapons, maybe, possibly, and be done with it. To each their own war. She shouldn’t be wanting to help him fight his. Not anymore than she already is. A new arm, names, places. That’s enough. It has to be. She’s on a time crunch here and murder isn’t really her business.

That’s a lie.

Watching her watching him, he suddenly offers, “I read once that scars mean you survived.”

“Something did, at any rate,” she murmurs, tracing the shoulder port with careful fingers, as personal as she can make it, as non-clinical. She doesn’t need him to flashback right now.

His cynical laugh startles her enough to make her jump and his hand moves too fast, settling on her chest, between her breasts. Pressing down lightly. She punches out his wrist automatically, leaping back several feet, panting, wide-eyed.

“Fucker!” she hisses.

He doesn’t even move, not the slightest bit apologetic. “Something did,” he agrees. Then he reaches across his body, grabs the bicep of his left arm and twists until it all comes loose, holding the prosthetic-that’s-really-a-weapon out to her like a gift. Like a boy offering a girl flowers. Here, have part of my body. Isn’t it nice?

It takes both hands for Tasha to hold, even heavier than she remembers from her examinations. “Did they make this from scrap metal? Jesus, that is shitty.” She digs a thumbnail into the little space between plates, presses in. The metal protests, then shifts. Absolute shit. “I used an alloy for the new one, by the way. More durable, lighter and, wait for it, slower to react to temperature changes. So going out in the sun or cold shouldn’t fuck you up nearly as much anymore.”

She’d do the same for herself, but there really isn’t all that much point, is there? It’s winter now, the days are milder and come summer… there’s not much point. Her sunbathing days are over, anyway.

“And if you let me play with the port for a bit, I can probably restore some sensation as well. The nerve connections are there, they were just focused on motion, until now, correct?”

A nod. He moved the old arm like he did his flesh one, without thought or conscious command, up and it went up, fist and it fisted. But there was no feeling in it and Tasha has the bill to prove it. Unless he’s watching what his hand is doing, he has a definite tendency to grip too hard, breaking stuff because he can’t feel when his hold is secure. JARVIS has taken to buying horrible novelty mugs in bulk and watching Winter break them, one by one. Those two are weird, anyway. The man out of time has taken to Tasha’s robot family like a duck to water and he and JARVIS can be found chatting like old biddies at all hours of the day. It’s hilarious.

“You want to play with my nerve endings?” He asks, voice very careful. Controlled. Memory again. Some days she wants to apologize for giving them back to him, all that pain, all that horror. But she knows he’d probably punch her, so she just.

Doesn’t.

Shaking her head, she finally dumps the old arm, points toward the miniature clamps attached to the end of the new on. Cables with tiny, tiny metal claws at the ends. “Frankenstein and Company already did that. They cyborg-ified you with surprising success, considering it was, what, the fifties? Sixties? They couldn’t even properly transplant organs then, the first successful transplantation was, what, 1954, so rewiring you with machine parts was… amazing. It’s been fifty years and it’s still amazing and I’ll eat my imaginary hat if they didn’t have some kind of cheat, like, I don’t know. Aliens? Tech from the future? Magic? Don’t fucking ask me. But the work is there, and it’s decent enough for me to not want to cut you open and play with your insides, okay? I just need to tweak what’s already there. It shouldn’t do more than maybe sting. That cool, babe?”

There it is again, that photonegative smile. “I’ll survive,” he announces. He’s stealing her lines now.

“That’s the spirit,” she praises, and picks up her tools. Let’s see if Tasha Stark can make a better cyborg than a bunch of Nazi scientists in the dark ages.

+

Of course she can. She’s Tasha Fucking Stark.

“Merry Christmas, my one-armed friend!” Because she wants to, she tags on, “For _you_.”

She thinks he gets it.

+

He watches her, dark head bent low over his arm, callused hands working delicately on the tiny mechanisms in his new elbow. She mutters, curses occasionally, half English, half Russian. He wonders if she knows this happens more and more. It’s not just him slip-sliding between languages anymore.

He knows she speaks more than those two, just like he does, but these are the ones that have become common between them. Her English, his Russian, a strange, lilting combination of both.

The American with the Russian name, the Russian with the American name.

She is careful with him, his arm, his person, with her body and her actions. More so than she ever has been with her mouth. Her mouth runs off with her, unafraid and unhorrified, giving voice to the carnage inside her head, his head, both their heads. She speaks about murder, about blood and guilt and all the ways he is still half hollowed-out without hesitation. She’s an open wound, a ragged thing, bleeding all over both of them, messy and barely scabbing over.

But her hands on his scarred body are gentle as a lover’s, and so, so careful.

He likes it, both her brashness and her care. Anna pitied him, calling him a broken animal. Tasha knows how damaged he is and simply does not care. Her irreverence for his nightmares is better than quiet horror would be and her care is a contrast to all he remembers. Anna treated him like glass and saw her own death coming every time she looked at him. Tasha is made of steel and she assumes he is, too. She lets the voice deliver him cigarettes and watches as he smokes them, one after another, even though, apparently, cigarettes are frowned upon in this century. She just sits there, tinkering on her computers and lets him smoke up a storm because he remembers being a smoker and it calms some base parts of him. Lets him work things out. DPA, she keeps joking and it’s the best laugh he remembers having since 1945.

Before is still a murky puddle, flashes only. Bony elbows and blue eyes, a deep voice and a boyish laugh.

Steve Rogers, he’s been told. But no matter how long he stares at the black and white image Tasha has given him, it remains two dimensional. And why should he remember? The man is dead. They are all dead.

He can’t go back.

No, he’d rather be here, alive and free and _himself_ , or something close to it, something that might almost, almost be ‘Bucky’ again. Rather be here, with Tasha trailing fingers up the inside of his forearm, asking, “Feel that?”

He cocks his head, closes his eyes. Seeing is sometimes like phantom-feeling. “Pick another place,” he tells her and waits.

“Nothing.”

He hears her shift, come closer. Instinct tells him to open his eyes and track the enemy. He stays still, lets her. There is pressure on his hand, his fingers. Snapping them closed, he elicits a startled shout from her and when he looks, he has three of her fingers trapped between his. He releases them with care.

She shakes them out, they obviously smart. But she doesn’t seem to mind, beams at him like a summer sunrise, “You felt that! You totally felt that, I am so fucking awesome, high five!”

Holding out her hand, she gives him an expectant look. Obediently, he raises his left, carefully taps it against her flesh palm. He feels that, too. Tasha grins, wide and open, spins on her heel and bows flashily to her robots, waiting close by. “I am the fucking best and you know it!” she crows, infectious with joyous pride, before turning to face him once again and throwing her arms around him.

Hugging him.

He cannot remember the last time he was hugged.

He cannot remember ever having been hugged.

He knows he must have been, but his memory is still a black hole, a dark space. He spends his days concentrating hard on not being, as his host puts it, ‘bug fuck nuts’.

He does not remember being hugged. But his body seems to, because his own arms, old and new, move to accommodate her, pressing her close for a moment. Metal scrapes against metal as her chest meets his shoulder and she hisses, jumps backwards again, goes back to cheering herself.

“Babe,” she calls, “this is amazing, I am brilliant, and you look hot ass sexy with that new arm, I love it. You adore it, too, admit it!”

She keeps dancing around like a complete idiot, until, suddenly, she stops.

Hand pressed to her chest, panting hard, hissing in pain. She stumbles toward the nearest work bench, leans on it and tries to control her breathing. The sudden silence in the wake of her happiness is startling.

He stands to make his way over, placing himself to catch her if she falls. “Natasha?”

She waves at him limply. “Never mind me, nothing here to see. Scoot. I’m fine. Really.”

Blatantly lying and not even trying to hide it. Whatever is hurting her seems to come in waves and the next one staggers her enough to slump into the table, barely upright. He smells burning flesh, eyes zeroing in on her chest piece.

“Voice?” he asks, knowing JARVIS will tell him. JARVIS always explains. But before the machine has a chance, Tasha herself speaks.

“Shit,” she hisses, clawing uselessly at the air, not daring to touch. “Wooden chest on my desk. JARV?”

The voice takes over, directing him toward the indicated box, ordering him to retrieve one of the square little things inside and bring it to Tasha, who is shirtless and fighting to be rid of her underwear. Placing the square in her hand, he makes short work of it, shredding the elastic fabric right down the middle of her back with one hand, holding her upright with the other, even as she stiffens at his fast movements, his body pressed against hers.

Half naked and in pain she is perversely beautiful. Physically older than him by a good decade, she is firm, toned, pale. Her breasts are separated by the metal casing of her arc reactor, shining blue from her chest. Around it, pale pink scar tissue, still new, wars with black veins, spreading poison. Most might recoil at the sight, but just as she looked at him and did not flinch, he can look at her and see what she explained to him, months ago now.

This is their reward and their punishment for surviving.

Open wounds.

There is no shame in that.

She presses against a hidden catch in the reactor casing, causes it to disengage and pop out and, with shaking fingers, she switches a smoking metal square for the one he brought her, before shoving the light back into her chest and exhaling in painful relief.

After a few moments, she picks up her shirt and puts it back on, leaving the light to shine through the thin material in a way it hadn’t before. “This was supposed to last another week, goddamn it. At this rate, I won’t finish everything.”

It’s said mostly to herself, so he lets it be until her eyes land on his new limb. “At least this one’s off the list,” she mutters, shrugs. “Alright, where did I put the schematics for that other – “

“No,” he tells her, sharply, when it becomes clear she wants to keep working.

“What?”

“You need to rest.”

She bares her teeth, parody of a smile. “I’ll rest when I’m dead,” she counters, flippant and light. A joke. Only a joke.

But her eyes are too dark and her fists curled too tightly and he understands, suddenly, what is happening. Understands the hurried panic in everything she does, the long hours, the quickly blanked screens, the way she looks at people through her little gadgets, full of sorrow and helplessness.

“This,” he points at her chest, “is poison.” It seems easier to say out loud than, “You’re dying.” He tries to give voice to it, to tell the truth out loud. The words will not come. His skin feels too tight. His heart pounds with irrational anger.

She shrugs, flippant, like it doesn’t matter. “Yeah, well. It’s also all that’s keeping me alive, so, I figure, hey, I’m okay with the poison. At least I’ve got a few months left, this way.”

That sounds entirely unlike the fierce woman he has come to know. “You have accepted that you’re going to die. Just like that.” He itches to shake her until sense returns, until she swears, on anything she believes in, that she won’t leave him. The urge is startling and real and terrible. He doesn’t move.

Her eyes go dark, narrow. Angry in return.

“Not really, actually, but I’ve tired just about anything. There’s a reason this thing needs palladium. If it ran on fucking rainbows and hope, I wouldn’t be in this situation, but guess what, it doesn’t! And it’s not like I was planning to make myself immortal with this! All it needed to do was keep me alive long enough to kill everyone in that fucking camp and clean up a few messes, besides, and guess what, it did! So no, I’ve not accepted it, but sobbing myself to sleep every night isn’t going to fix _shit_ , you asshole, so stop being a bitch! Got you your new arm, didn’t I? And you’ll get your list of HYDRA people to avenge at, or whatever the hell you want, too, before I croak!” She flings up her arms and all he can think is, there she is. There is fiery, fierce Tasha, who smiles with all her teeth and isn’t scared of the monster she let into her home.

There she is, and she’s given up. There she is, and she thinks the things she promised him are all the reason he wants her alive. It’s… surprisingly untrue.

Emotions beyond hate and anger are still strange, unfamiliar. He has words and he has feelings, but no memory of how they correspond. Is this happiness? Is this contentment? Is this pride? He can’t remember. As with most things, the disconnect is too wide and the bridges he builds are crooked, wrong.

The voice calls him by his old name, sometimes. Mr. Barnes. Worse, Sergeant Barnes. He is not that man anymore. He never will be again. A man, perhaps, one day, but not that man. Not the man bony elbows and blue eyes loved. Neither is he the man the little girls called Big Brother. Something in between, with crooked bridges, lopsided and wrong and hollowed-out.

Tasha calls him by a hundred different nicknames; pet names, most often. He is grateful beyond reason for her quiet understanding, her patience.

The thought that he will have to be without her irreverent teasing and quiet acceptance soon chills him. The idea that she might not be there to still him with a quiet order, a hand on his arm or shoulder, whenever his options get too overwhelming and choice seems an impossible concept after so long without it, well. It makes something churn in his stomach. A hungry feeling, like anger, but also like fear. Dread, perhaps. Dread seems fitting. He doesn’t want to lose her. She is his… friend?

Friend. It fits.

Like bony elbows, or as close as he is capable of, anymore.

“I don’t want you to die,” he says, plainly, clumsily. Honestly. His anger swept away in a tide of newfound understanding. Tasha Stark is his friend and he wants her to stay.  
If he still knew how to have faith, he might pray.

With an eye-roll, downplaying everything, she points out, “Because you have imprinted on me like a baby duckling, we have been over this.” She pauses. “I think. That conversation might have been inside my head.” Trying to deflect.

It was. And he is not a duck. Reading his scowl, she backtracks, “Or a… tiger? You can be a tiger, if that’s better. A tiger who imprints on a momma duck and that’s… okay, no, now I crave fried duck, what is wrong with me.”

It’s just noise, her rant, a way to cover up the silence and the truths she dropped into it. He knows her well enough by now to understand. She likes noise and motion like any good con man, lies with her words and her body, distracts. He shakes his head.

“Maybe I have,” he allows. Imprinted on her. He’s been… himself for three months and he has yet to speak with anyone except her and the voice. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want you to die.”

If he keeps repeating it, maybe it will sink into her bones and make it true. Maybe he can keep her alive by sheer force of will.

Deflating mid-rant, she slumps into herself, hand rising to protectively cover her chest. He doesn’t know if she’s aware of the tell, or the way her eyes go glassy and dark when she offers, “Yeah, well. Get over it.”

+

“JARVIS,” she orders, when the One Armed Bandit finally, finally gives up on staring holes into her back and takes himself and spiffy new arm out of her lab, leaving her to die in peace.

Literally.

She hopes.

“List, please.”

JARVIS pulls up the List, capital L, without a word. He’s not okay with her dying either. What is it with people suddenly wanting her alive? She always knew the reactor was a temporary fix. A way to live long enough to clean up the mess she made of the world. And yeah, okay, maybe she thought she’d find something to replace the palladium, but she hasn’t, and it was never a priority anyway. This is going to be a very important year for her, okay? She’s too busy making it count.

The List consists of surprisingly few items, considering it’s Tasha Fucking Stark’s bucket list. But then, she got shit like ‘parachuting’ and ‘having a threesome’ out of the way a long time ago. The List goes as follows:

1, Give the company to Pep and make sure she gets to keep it.  
2, Build a better arm.  
3, Make a list of names of Hydra people and pass it on.  
4, Build Rhodey a suit.  
5, Make sure JARV and the bots are taken care of.  
6, Find my weapons. Destroy them. All of them. Down to the last fucking penknife.

SI has never, to her knowledge, produced knives, but the sentiment still stands. She’s done with 2, working on 1, 3 and 4 and, actually, 6 sounds like a wonderful distraction right now.

There’s a lovely little weapons cache with her name on it – literally – in the Syrian Desert and Tasha feels like making shit go boom. It has absolutely no ties to HYDRA and that whole mess, which makes it look even more enticing from where she’s standing, with a worried, semi-homicidal mother hen breathing down her metaphorical neck about her little mortality problem.

Suiting up and exploding shit is just the kind of therapy no doctor ever ordered. Perfect way to forget the exciting new body art on her chest and the way the dead-inside Russian assassin just looked at her like he was maybe considering crying. Because of her.

Because she’s croaking.

Yeah, she definitely needs to blow shit up. She steps onto the assembly platform and whistles the bots into action, watching distantly as the multiple arms put her armor on her until Tasha Stark is nothing more than a memory and Iron Man stands in her place, strong and fast and better than she ever could be. Healthy. Alive.

She runs the system checks with JARVIS and then turns to make her way outside, to the beach, where she can take off without ending up splashed across twenty-seven tabloids and five broadsheets by morning.

Of course, he’s waiting for her by the door, arms crossed over his chest, looking stern. And hot. Mostly angry. And JARVIS definitely tattled on her.

“Where are you doing?”

Tasha takes a good long look down her own body, suited up and ready to kick terrorist ass. Raises an eyebrow. “Dinner and a movie?” she suggests, mildly.

She understands, vaguely, that she doesn’t really have a reason to be pissed at the man in front of her. He has nothing to do with the fact that she feels shitty because she’s dying. But he’s there and he’s convenient and he _won’t leave_. For some damn reason, he won’t leave.

Her brain takes that as permission to be an asshole to him.

He quirks an eyebrow right back and for a beat or two, she thinks this’ll end in a fight. But then he shakes his head, tells her, “Bring back pizza.”

And he steps aside. She falls a little bit in love with him right there, even before he tags on, “Next time, I want to come with you.”

+

“Tonight?” Brock asks, staring down at the rickety table covered in maps, blue prints and guard schedules.

Steve, across from him, frowns at the mess and squints against the sand that gets _everywhere_. He hates the cold, but the Syrian Desert isn’t for him, either.

They’ve been working from inside this rundown safe house at the edge of Damascus for a week and he wants this mission _over_. It’s his first since the ice, his first with STRIKE. His first without his team.

The territory is foreign to him, the sneaking around is something he’s not used to and the objective is one he’s not sure he can agree with. Oh, he’s all for liberating terrorists of their weapons. At least since Agent Sitwell sat him down and explained, in depth, what terrorists are in the twenty-first century. But their orders are to confiscate the heavy weaponry they find and Steve can’t help but wonder why. He’s always held with destroying any enemy weapons he came across and it’s always worked out.

He’s uncomfortable with all of this, but what else is he going to do? He doesn’t know this world, doesn’t understand it. He has nowhere to go and no-one to turn to. All he has is SHIELD, the defender that rose from the ashes of the war against HYDRA. He feels, in a way, like he is responsible for the agency. It was made in his image, the Director assured him. Shield, not sword. Defender, not attacker.

It’s a good goal. A noble one. But Steve doesn’t understand how wars are fought now, quietly and with machines, impersonal button-pushing. Stealing, lying, thieving.

Sometimes, in those dreams where Buck survived, they run away to a place without war, a place where Steve is an artist and Bucky fixes radios, or something, for a bit of cash.

It’s a very Steve dream. But those kinds of dreams stopped mattering the moment Captain America was born.

And he is still that.

Seventy years and a world so far from his own, he is still Captain America.

So he shuffles some papers around and nods toward Brock. “Tonight. We go in from the east. Shift change is midnight, right?”

“Yeah, it is. Listen-“

Whatever he meant to say is cut off by Chance banging into the room, Ramirez on her heels, laptop in hand. He places it on the table, spins it so both Brock and Steve can see the screen. The technology is intimidating.

The image is dark, grainy and very clear.

“So,” Ramirez says, his voice half-amused, half-angry. “Satellite images show that, apparently, Iron Man just blew the shit out of our target.”

On screen, the fire, exploding in stop motion images, looks a bit like a flower.

“Well,” Brock announces. “Fuck.”

+

All in all, Tasha is gone nearly twenty hours. After thirteen, the television informs him of Iron Man attacking a compound full of illegally obtained weaponry and wiping it off the face of the earth. On screen, people argue about whether Iron Man is a hero or a villain.

“Those weapons would have been used to destroy our way of life,” a man in a suit says.

“So far, there have been several dozen confirmed casualties. These men might have been, or planned to become terrorists, but they, too deserved a fair trial. Iron Man has no right to judge people, especially not for crimes not yet committed. Doing so makes him no better than the terrorists he claims to be fighting against,” a woman with a severe bun argues back.

“Does everyone think like this?” he asks the room at large.

The voice answers promptly, “ _At the moment, opinion seems split evenly down the middle, though the public has been known to be extremely fickle in these matters. Anything would tip them over. Would you like me to illustrate with examples?_ ”

He considers it, but would rather watch the current news. “No, thank you.”

“ _Ask, if you have anymore questions._ ”

“I will. Thank you.” The voice hums in acknowledgement, then falls silent once more.

On TV, they go to and fro for over an hour, letting callers rant in between. Hero. Villain. Hero. Villain.

“Do you care?” he asks, idly, before turning toward the doorway where Tasha stands. She has already stripped out of her armor, leaving her barefoot and freshly showered, one arm bandaged from wrist to elbow. She looks exhausted. The pizza in her left hand is cold. He heard her come in almost an hour ago.

“About what they say, or about what I do?” she challenges.

Shuffling along the sofa to make room for her, he shrugs. “Yes.”

She sits, drawing her legs close automatically, tucking bare toes under his thigh like she’s done it for years. Her head comes to rest along the back of the sofa, eyes closed. “No,” she finally answers.

“Opinions have never mattered to me and I never claimed to be a good person. And for your information, JARVIS was watching that place via satellite for a week. There were no innocents there.”

She says it like she thinks he cares. Like she thinks he doubts her. Box on his lap, he grabs a piece of pizza, passes it over. Keeps a second for himself. “I want to go out with you.”

He has learned all he can about this age from watching and listening. Now he needs to do. Now that he knows his time with her is limited, he needs to use it. Enough research, enough waiting. HYDRA is out there and he wants it to burn.

Blinking lazily at him across cheese strings and half-eaten mushrooms, she hesitantly offers, “Natasha Stark could use a bodyguard.”

It’s not what he asked for, but, “That will work.”

“We need to talk about names. I can keep calling you One Armed Bandit until the cows come home, but on paper it won’t hold up.”

“Not… him,” he immediately refuses, before she can even make the suggestion. Bucky. Bucky is buried under seventy years of ice and snow, far away and long ago.

Thoughtfully, she hums. Offers, “How about a bit of both? James Winter. Nice, nondescript. Easy to fake up paperwork for. Old and new. The arm’s borrowed, your eyes are blue. You’ll be the prettiest bride at the ball.”

His lips quirk without permission. “Are you doing to dance with me?”

“All night long, babe. All night long.”

“Then I’ll be – “

“ _Miss Stark, I apologize for the interruption, but I have finally finished tracking the list of known HYDRA scientists you and Mr. Winter have given me. My results are fairly alarming, especially considering that there is currently a SHIELD operative at the door._ ”

To say they both tense would be an overstatement, because they never fully relax in the first place. But Winter – James Winter, how strangely simple – puts his slice back in the pizza box, closes the lid and puts it down, automatically erasing traces of his presence.

Tasha holds up a hand as he is about to bleed into the shadows of the hallway. “Hold on. JAR, buddy, what did you find? Spark notes only.”

The voice delivers, as always. “ _After 1945, Operation Paperclip was started, with the goal to steal German and Russian scientists away from their home countries to slow their efforts to rebuild and re-arm themselves. Of the seventy names you have given me of former HYDRA personnel, forty-nine joined the project under various aliases. All of them were hired by, and thus operated under the purview of, the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division._ ”

Tasha slaps both hands on her thighs, reacting faster than Winter can. “Are you telling me SHIELD fucking _hired_ most of HYDRA’s brain for themselves?”

“ _And then left them to work closely together. Records indicate all of them stationed in the same facility until the late fifties, some longer than that, yes. Of those forty-nine former HYDRA agents, twenty-two still have children or grandchildren in service of SHIELD today._ ”

The perfect sleepers, generations removed from any suspicion, clean records, perfectly legal and above-board histories. It’s all a good assassin could dream of. SHIELD probably believes to have turned these people, to have cured them of their former beliefs, but Winter knows better. He has scars and nightmares to prove that ideas don’t die and believers don’t fall from faith just because it is convenient. He knows, like he knows the weight of his bones and his sins, that HYDRA lives, and lives inside of SHIELD.

What worth is a shield when the poisoned arrow has already pierced it? Dead weight to drag you down, nothing more.

“Voice, gather anything you can find about these children, including long-term teammates, or similar. The chances of them being turned are high.”

Tasha looks pale, paler than before, shock warring with exhaustion. She has mentioned SHIELD before, brought them up in conversation a time or two. Considered them a pest, but a useful one. One of their agents was in her house. He spent time with Pepper. “HYDRA, huh?” she mumbles.

The voice takes a beat too long to answer. “Miss, I believe my systems are being in-fil-----.”

Nothing. The lights die a split second later and Winter disappears into the deepened shadows a beat after that, hands going for the knives hidden inside his clothes, the blade Tasha build into is left forearm.

He waits.

+

Tasha knows who Nick Fury is. Of course she does, she did her homework after Agent Coulson first introduced himself, all bland smiles and stupid, long-ass agency name. Smoke screen. Teeter a bit, make a dumb joke, look how harmless I am. Pepper didn’t really fall for it and Tasha bought it for about zero-point-two seconds.

She looked them up, Coulson, SHIELD, Fury, Hill. All the big players, the head-bozos. The people to impress or fuck up in case of emergency. She didn’t trust them, not one second.

But neither did she think they were harboring the people that kept a man on ice to use as a mindless weapon for seventy years. She expected a big, dumb bureaucratic engine full of snooty, morally superior assholes. Not monsters in lab coats who keep slaves to do their dirty work for them.

Maybe JARVIS is wrong. Maybe the remnants of HYDRA inside SHIELD are really converts, good guys, white hats. Maybe he’s half right and SHIELD has been infiltrated but not undermined, a few rotten apples on a healthy tree. Maybe she’s being paranoid.

But someone just pulled the plug on _her_ AI and is in the process of invading her home. And really, Tasha has never been lucky.

She stretches across the sofa, relaxed and lazy. She kind of wants to race for the suit, but that would be admitting weakness and Winter is there. She can feel his gaze on her and she trusts him to have her back on this.

He’s the one who wants HYDRA dead.

She can trust him right now, even if it makes her stomach churn with the urge to throw up, because trust. Trust is a really goddamn awful idea. Trust leads to heart attacks, right here, in this room, on this sofa, gaping hole in her chest and she wishes, even in her nightmares, she wishes Obie had been cruel about it. But he was kind. Kind and patient and disappointed and she _trusted_ him, oh god.

Director Nicholas J. Fury comes striding into her living room like he owns it and if he hurt JARVIS permanently, she will put on her suit, fly him several miles straight up into the sky and then drop him. And she will cheer.

“Miss Stark,” he greets, all polite and shit.

“Nick,” she retorts, because why be polite when you can knock someone off balance? The house is dark, but there’s enough moonlight coming in through the large windows to let them both see. Fury’s impressive enough, dark leather and eye patch. Or he would be, if Tasha hadn’t spent the past three months being roommates with a man who casually tries to strangle her when he has a bad day. “What brings you to my humble abode? And why the fuck didn’t you ring the doorbell?”

A shrug. He doesn’t seem bothered by her knowing who he is. More’s the pity. “Would you have let me in if I had?”

She shrugs right back, “To be honest, I don’t really need any more copies of the Watchtower. But it was nice of you to drop by.” She waves cutely.

He snorts. “I’m fresh out, sorry. And your butler was terribly rude.”

“He has bad days. What did you do with him anyway? He usually hangs around.” Faking boredom is hard when one of your best friends has been disabled and you don’t know fuck about how. JARVIS should not be hackable to a bunch of government desk jockeys in bad suits. Or, you know, leather coats.

Fury smiles. “He took a nap. Now, Miss Stark. I would like to speak to you about the Avengers Initiative.”

“Sounds kinky.”

“You have entered a world far bigger than you can imagine, Stark, and the Avengers Initiative is part of that. A group of special people, brought together to protect this world from all that is to come.”

“And prepare for the twenty-first century?” she quips, because Tasha has never been able to resist either quoting campy science fiction, or making authority figures froth at the mouth. A chance to do both? Too good to pass up. Fury breathes heavily.

“I don’t give a fuck what you call it, Stark. This world is on the brink of something big and it needs to be protected!” He sounds pissed. Well, that escalated quickly.

Surreptitiously, she double taps the screen of the tablet on the end table, where she just conveniently settled her hand. It doesn’t react. JARVIS, baby, where the hell are you?

“By SHIELD,” she half asks, voice dripping with derision.

“You think you can do it alone?” It’s almost nice, that he seems to assume she wants to. Just because she’s cleaning up the mess she made, that doesn’t mean she’s ready to play at saving kittens out of trees. Pretty damn stupid, but nice.

“I think I’m not a team player and I don’t follow orders well. Especially orders from people like you.”

Fury snorts. “You think you know shit about the world you just dipped your toes in? You should be grateful SHIELD is offering you a chance to be useful. To atone for your mistakes. Iron Man has the capacity to be something great. But if you keep going the way you have, shooting down measly terrorists and turning people against you, now, that’s just stupid.”

“And you’d rather have me helping with _your_ stupid, right?” She smiles, sweetly. In her head, she reaches a count of sixty, taps the screen again. Nothing. If JARVIS is dead, she is going to kill Nick Fury, all kidding aside.

The certainty startles her.

He shrugs, spreads his hands, palms out. Maybe. “Or I could let it slip to certain people that it would take someone pretty smart, with amazing tech, to create Iron Man. And that the first sighting of that damn thing was in Afghanistan, the day you escaped from your kidnappers.”

“You know,” she manages, voice still flat, poking at the bear, poking, poking, poking. “I expected something more subtle from you. This all seems a bit too… upfront for an organization like yours. Too bold.”

Another snort. She’s really starting to hate those. Fury takes a few quick steps closer, suddenly looming over her prone form, using his size against her. Intimidating her. A year ago, it wouldn’t have worked. A year ago, large men looming over her was an empty threat, a promise of violence that was never fulfilled. Now it isn’t. Now she has the trauma to back up the gesture and Obie, Obie, Obie, Obie on this sofa, pressing her into the cushions, flipping open a penknife and slicing her shirt open down the middle, then her bra, down to the still-healing mess of her chest, down to her heart.

Tasha gasps, hating herself for it even as she does it, hating that she’s a traumatized, pathetic _mess_ , as Fury draws even closer, asks, “What are you going to do? Call the police?”

And then he’s gone. Suddenly, out of nowhere, just gone. It takes her a full five seconds of blinking dumbly into the pale moonlit room to figure out that he didn’t just disappear. Rather, an angry Russian assassin drove him six feet back and then rode him into the ground, arm pressing on his windpipe, knees on his hands, holding him still.

The Winter Soldier looks ready to tear him to shreds. He isn’t saying a word, no threats, no yelling, just his face, shadowed by dark hair, the line of his shoulders, the strength in his metal arm, mostly hidden under a long sleeve.

He sits on top of Fury and holds him there, effortlessly.

Like he’s waiting.

Waiting, Tasha realizes a beat too late, for her. If she says the word, Fury does not leave this house alive. One word, and Winter will kill for her. On her say so. He lets her do this sometimes, order him when he can’t decide himself, force him still when he can’t stop moving. It’s only when he get so tangled up in trying to function without direct orders for the first time in decades, only when he needs it. And it’s always little things. Sit. Eat. Take this, come here. And now here he is, waiting on her say so to murder a man or let him live. It’s a terrible feeling, and a heady one. There is someone willing to commit murder in her name.

The Winter Soldier is a weapon and Tasha has never learned to unmake weapons. She can create them and she can detonate them. She can’t turn them back into their component parts. She can’t make the man sitting on top of Nicky Fury whole. All she can do, all she could do, was give him back his control. Let him be the one to aim himself.

Instead, he chose to put himself in her hands. To let _her_ aim him. He trusts her. To not misfire him. To not abuse him. To be better than the people who enslaved him before.

And she likes it.

When this is over, she is going to throw up every single bite of pizza she’s eaten tonight, and possibly her breakfast, too. Because somehow, he’s come to the conclusion that she’s better than HYDRA. Jesus fuck, hasn’t he looked her up? Can’t he read? Doesn’t he _know_?

“I think,” she says, too late, voice hoarse, something between angry and scared, “that you had better leave, Director. My bodyguard doesn’t seem to like you much.”

Tap. Tap. Briefly, the screen flickers blue.

Winter moves too fast to track in the semi-dark, giving Fury free. The man rolls to his feet, backing up to keep both of them in his field of vision, assessing them all over again. Winter is new, and Tasha just proved herself to be more dangerous than she should have been.

Still, he needs to save face. “Think about what I said, Stark.”

He isn’t looking at her while he speaks, tries to get a good look at the man who took him down. She’ll have to hurry up with the paperwork for James Winter, it seems, before SHIELD gets ideas. If she remembers her history right, Bucky Barnes had sisters. One of them must have had kids. She can make James Winter a distant cousin or something. Explain his face. It’s not rock solid, but honestly, who sees the face of a man dead for decades and thinks ‘oh look, frozen instant assassin from the forties’. No-one, that’s who. People like simple explanations, Tasha has learned. Even SHIELD will have no reason to doubt that story. Not until they give them one.

But that’s for later. Tomorrow. Not now. Now…

JARVIS picks that exact moment to make himself known by bringing the lights back up – but only in the living room. Winter, in the mouth of the hallway, remains in shadow. Good boy; there is a reason Tasha loves her AI to unreasonable heights.

“ _Miss Stark,_ ” he announces. His voice is off, tinny, a default setting she hasn’t heard in years, which tells her a lot about how hard he got hit. He’s alive and kicking, but he’s only running necessary programs, not bothering with any of the usual trimmings.

“Hey there, buddy,” she returns, pretending her heart didn’t just drop into the general region of her stomach with relief. He’s alive. He’s alive, oh god, he’s alive. “Open the doors for our guest, won’t you?”

Fury holds out for a few more seconds, his face a rictus mask of anger and Tasha knows, knows, that if it were just her and him, if there weren’t so much fucking politics attached to this, he’d make a fair attempt at strangling her right now. But it is and so he just grinds his teeth and gives up to fight another day. Gives up, maybe, knowing that he just handled her in the worst way he possibly could have and he made her more than angry with it. He made her an enemy. Because he made her afraid. And no-one makes Tasha Fucking Stark afraid and walks away.

And he knows it.

Smart enough to be dangerous, that one. She watches him, still reclined on the sofa like she doesn’t have a care in the world, like her heart isn’t in her throat, beating a mile a minute, like she isn’t on the verge of a panic attack because Winter just revealed himself and JARVIS is _hurt_ , because she just declared _war_ on SHIELD, when she was half hoping they might be allies.

Then the Director gives in and with a bitter snarl in her direction, he turns on his heel and leaves.

JARVIS makes sure to slam the door behind him. “ _Systems are armed, Miss Stark. My base code is intact. I am working on retracing the hack. I would like to return the favor, if I may?_ ”

That’s her boy. He’s going to _ruin_ SHIELD for this. He barely waits for Tasha to nod, before adding, “ _Then please excuse me, I must focus elsewhere._ ” A beat of silence. “ _I am glad you are okay._ ”

She laughs, helplessly. “You too, JAR. Shit, for a moment there I thought those fuckers got you.”

Still with that alien, mechanical voice, he answers, “ _Merely playing possum while rebooting,_ ” and then he’s gone.

Okay then. Crisis over.

Tasha hunches in on herself, both hands pressed to her chest and tries to force oxygen into her burning lungs. Oh god, oh god, oh god, what the fuck just happened? What the fuck, what did Fury do, what did he even want, did he really try to blackmail and yell her into working for him, god, is he HYDRA or just a regular asshole, how the hell is she supposed to fight the biggest spy organization in the _world_ , she’s dying and this is, this is…

“Breathe, Tasha, come on,” a quiet voice orders, words strange to her ears. Russian, she registers after a moment. Winter. She likes the way he says her name. Even likes the way he smells of cigarettes. He was smoking while she was gone. “Breathe, slowly. In and out, don’t lose it now.”

She breathes. What other choice does she have but to breathe?

She crawled out of that cave, she killed the men who put her there, she got out. She got away. She survived.

She’s still here. And she’ll survive this, too.

“That’s it,” the voice murmurs, too soft, too talkative by far.

A giggle escapes her, and even she can hear the hysterical tinge to it. “Look at you, Chatty Kathy,” she manages, between one too-careful breath and the next. “Today’s like the goddamn mid-season finale of my life. Fuck.”

“What?”

Right. Pop-culture retard. She focuses on that because it’s better than focusing on the huge-ass mess her life has become. Right now, the mind wipe machine in her lab looks _really_ tempting. She could grab Winter, move them both to Alaska and they could spend the rest of her, admittedly short life, as happy amnesiacs. It’d be grand.

“Middle of a season on a TV show. It’s when all the great revelations happen, but nothing gets resolved. First your arm, then my little poisoning problem, Syria, HYDRA, SHIELD, and now fucking Fury. And you turn out to be a super-duper mother hen. That might be the greatest revelation of them all.”

He huffs. “I am not super-duper mother-henning you.”

“It’s beautiful how you’ve taken on my habit of butchering the English language. I am so proud of you.” She wipes away a little tear.

“I should have let you panic,” he grumbles, not really angry. She can tell. He’s not trying to choke her yet. That, and he just saved her from Fury.

“You luuuuurve me,” she gloats, struck by the sudden realization.

With a face like he’s smelling something bad, he allows, “You mentioned ducks. And tigers.” Cue sardonic look. “And you are using me to distract yourself.”

She raises one hand, palm flat. “You caught me, your honor. Would you like me to turn into a spastic puddle on the floor instead?”

For a moment, he seems to seriously consider it. “No. I would hate for Dummy to have to clean that up.”

“When did you get so sassy? I liked you better when you were a brooding, functioning mute.”

“No, you didn’t.”

There’s something honest there, suddenly, and more real than the rest of this bizarre conversation. “No, I didn’t. And thank you. For kicking Fury’s ass.”

“You’re welcome. Now, how about bed?”

“Are you propositioning me, babe? You know you work for me now, right? That’s sexual harassment.”

“Remind me what that is, again? I haven’t gotten around to it, yet.”

“That’s where you take me to bed,” she clarifies, without clarifying anything.

Good-naturedly, he nods anyway and actually, “Oh my god, are you carrying me, bridal style? Did you hit your head? Are you fucking – watch the head!”

He compensates for her flailing and asks, “Would you rather walk? You were already shaky when you got back. You are… worse, now.”

Anyone else, Tasha would get on her feet and walk to her bed out of sheer spite. Anyone else. As it is, she just sighs and admits defeat. The Syrians had anti-aircraft stations. She was already beat to hell before tonight’s little Interlude with Spy.

So she lets her new bodyguard carry her to bed like some damn damsel. “I hoped we could use SHIELD to ferret out HYDRA,” she admits, halfway up the stairs. “Seems like things just got a whole lot harder.”

She reaches out to open her bedroom door, lets herself be deposited on the bed. Unashamedly, she immediately crawls under the singularly unsexy duvet she bought herself after Afghanistan. Since she’s not using the place as a fuck pad anymore, there’s no point in keeping things sleek. Comfort won out.

“You have done your part,” he replies, belatedly, as he straightens to leave. “You have compiled a list of names for me.”

With a snort, she asks, “After this? No way am I letting you do this alone. Letting you get your revenge on was okay while it was just a few mad scientists in dark basements, but this is a huge ass organization, and their leader is the king of ass clowns.”

He made her afraid. He shoved himself into her space, loomed over her and threatened to take things from her. He came into her house, he hurt her people, and he _made her afraid_. For that alone, he has to pay.

If he’d come softly, politely. If he’d come with a little bit of the praise, the friendship she’s so hungry for. If he’d come with a smile. Not even that. If he’s just come without the threats. Without the balled fists. If he’d just come without trying to make her small.

But he didn’t. And she wants to make him pay for it.

Winter stops, takes a step closer to her. “It’s not your fight.”

Isn’t it, though? Her weapons aside, didn’t she make it her fight the moment she looked at him through the glass and decided to save him? Once you save something you’re responsible for it, isn’t that how it goes?

“It’s not yours either. The people who did what they did to you are long dead. This, whatever this is, is no more your fight than mine. I get it. I do. You just want to get some kind of justice, but let’s face it, that’s it. Besides,” she jokes, without it being funny, “I could do worse with my last few months on Earth. Taking down Fury and a whole bunch of Nazi sleepers sounds like a grand old time, really.”

Fury made her afraid. HYDRA made Winter hurt.

Empathy. Fuck her life.

After a long silence, that gets her a single nod. He makes to leave again and she stops him again. “Hey. Are you sleeping tonight?”

She already knows the answer. “No.”

“Cool. Neither am I. Stay.” It’s as close as she’ll ever get to saying _please don’t leave me alone_. The last person she slept beside was Yinsen, when he guarded her in the cave. But that’s okay, because she doubts she’ll sleep at all tonight. He hesitates, then nods, walking to the other side of the bed. He doesn’t even try to go for the chair in the far corner.

Here’s a secret: he’s almost as touch-starved as she is.

Instead he lies beside her, arm aligning with hers, close enough for her to feel him.

Tasha keeps breathing until her mind stops rattling and her hands stop shaking.

She can survive this, too.

+

The next morning, Winter wakes with a weight curled on his chest and the low rasping sound of flesh on metal in his ear. Tasha lies half on top of him, tracing the seams of his left arm with callused fingertips.

He fell asleep with her next to him as soon as the voice returned, fully aware and functional once again. Someone to take over as sentinel. He slept. And from the way she looks, still a bit hollow-eyed but rested, so did Tasha.

Trust. It seems such a strange concept, but with her, it comes easier every day. He thinks they might be less raw, the two of them. The bleeding slowing down.

“So,” she tells him, when she realizes he’s awake, not bothering with the pretense of moving away, or pretending shyness. “I had this half-baked notion of getting SHIELD to maybe help flush out HYDRA, or with this superheroing business, but I’d rather cut off my own extremities with a butter knife than get anywhere near Fury again, so it’s you and me. If… I mean, if you’re…”

Unfinished, the sentence hangs between them. Last night, she told him this wasn’t his fight. She wasn’t wrong. His creators are long dead, as are his handlers. In the past two decades, he has only been woken once. But the idea of HYDRA remains. The concept he was made to murder for lives in today’s HYDRA and he wants it gone. He is under no illusions that it will fix him, or make up for the tortures he has had to survive. Still, he wants – needs - it gone. Needs to destroy it with his own two hands. That is his mission. Take down HYDRA, protect Tasha.

Good enough.

“Yes.”

She sighs, disappointed, but like she expected his answer.

“Alright then. I figure I need to step up the bucket list a bit. Tie up loose ends. As soon as JARVIS is done stripping SHIELD to its dinky underwear, he can focus on getting us more names. In the long term, that’ll probably mean getting us locations where we can get hard evidence, stuff they kept offline. Battle.”

She snorts. “Sure am glad Iron Man never went public, now. Because he’s about to be branded a villain. While JARVIS compiles our shit list, I’ll work on giving Pep the company and building Rhodey a suit, so those things are taken care of, when….”

When she dies. “You’re giving up?”

He understands anger. What he feels now, that is anger. She seems so resigned, calmer even than yesterday, in her workshop. Perfectly at ease with letting herself be beaten.

With a shrug, she stops playing with his arm, stills completely for once.

“I’m still trying, because it’s not in my nature to not try, ever, but I’m pretty much disillusioned at this point. It’s been almost half a year since I got out of that cave, and I have tried every possible permutation of known elements there is to replace the palladium. Doing the same thing over and over again isn’t going to change anything, though. There’s better things I could be doing.”

Her voice gains momentum as she speaks, security, until she almost sounds like fierce Natasha again. She scared him last night, afraid and small. He understands fear, too. And he understands that he likes her better like this, fighting. Even if she knows it’s a losing battle.

“Alright,” he allows, “What else?” Because he has no doubt that there is more to her plan. Tasha’s mind is a marvel, quicksilver fast and just as dangerous.

She hums in thought. “I think a change of climate is in order. LA has gotten boring lately, don’t you think? It’d be much easier to introduce you as my bodyguard in a place where people won’t constantly wonder where you came from. Plus, my Dad’s mansion is in New York. It’s got his… shrine to all things Captain America. I think…,” she pauses, rephrases. “I’ve been trying not to push the memory issue, because apparently you shouldn’t, but I’m probably going to croak within the next six months, and I think we need to step that up, too.”

Making him remember. Bony elbows, blue eyes, watery soup and cold feet. Winter and weapons and red and blue and white. He knows, intellectually, how these fragments fit together, can match them like puzzle pieces, but that’s what they remain. Pieces. He has names, he has faces. But like emotions and the words for them, there is a dissonance where meaning used to be.

Remembering will be… good. Terrible, too, in so many ways, but good, he thinks. Even if he shatters under the weight of all his memories, at least he will know who it is, doing the shattering. Self. Him. Ego. Identity. He is, now, here, with Tasha, but he also was, before, without her. The empty spaces howl.

“I hope it works,” he tells her, because it seems the right thing to say. The easy thing. He doesn’t have words for what he feels remembering will to do him.

Tasha nods into his chest, her dark curls filling his nostrils. “Cool,” she says, more for anything to say than actual content.

Cool.

+

“Captain,” Director Fury greets as he swoops into the meeting thirty minutes late. Steve stands to return the greeting, gets waved off.

The rest of the team, scattered around the table and the coffee bar, greet politely.

“Alright, team,” the one-eyed man announces, “I’ve got a new job for you. There’s a threat that needs assessing and potentially, taking out. I assume you’re familiar with Iron Man.”

Steve watched the Director, the way he holds himself. His bearing is always tight, rigidly controlled, but today there is an edge to it, a new sharpness. Anger, Steve realizes. Worse, rage. The Director is livid and trying not to show it.

He’s curious about why, but he knows better than to ask. Michaels pipes up from the bagel basket, instead, “He ruined our op in Syria. We’re familiar.” He sounds hateful, more so than Steve thinks someone targeting terrorist weapons aches deserves.

“She,” Fury corrects and then waits until the surprised exclamations die down to slap a file as thick as Steve’s forearm on the table, his face twisted. Anger. Regret, maybe. About their enemy? “Iron Man is a woman. Natasha Stark, to be exact.”

More surprise. Shock. Outrage. “Stark?” Steve asks.

“Howard’s daughter. You’ll find the details enclosed, but the short of it is that she took over the company after Howard was assassinated. She built weapons, Cap, and they were damn good. Earlier this year she was kidnapped by terrorists. Upon freeing herself somehow and returning, she immediately discontinued the weapon manufacturing branch of Stark Industries. That’s what the public knows. What it doesn’t know is that she built a damn robot suit to fight her way out of the terrorist camp, fried everyone in there extra crispy and has since been on a mission to exterminate everyone who has her weapons.”

“So far, that doesn’t sound like a problem to me. She is fighting the same enemies we are, isn’t she?”

“That’s what we thought. But she has recently made some… hostile moves toward SHIELD. At the moment, what I need from you, is a threat assessment. If it becomes more, we’ll talk again. Everything clear?” There is a break, miniscule. A split second hesitation. Steve wonders what belongs in there, what they aren’t being told. What hostile moves a business woman, eve a well-armed one, could possibly make against the shield Fury wields with such ruthless efficiency.

“Why not just go for Stark, then? Publicly discredit her? That ought to get her off our backs?” Chance asks, straightening in her seat.

Steve fights to keep a frown off his face. This sounds a bit too much like Nazi Propaganda tactics for his liking.

“Would,” Fury answers promptly. “But she woman has an IQ of 170 or higher. One of our agents was there for the initial assessment of her after Afghanistan. He was absolutely sure she would go public. Something stopped her and since then, she’s taken steps to completely separate her two personas. Iron Man is sighted on one side of the planet, Stark on the other. We have no idea how she does it yet, but we have another agent working the Stark end. We try to take her down in the public eye, she will _shred_ us. Stark has played the press since before she could walk. We can’t win against her on her terms. So it needs to be on ours. And on our terms, on our turf, she is Iron Man. Our agent is trying to find a way to get to Natasha Stark. Your job is to work on the narcissist in a tin can. Can you do that?”

They can.

“Then Merry Christmas, Team. Get to it.”

+

+


	4. January

+

January

+

 [ **Stream this podfic chapter on your mobile device here**](http://reena.parakaproductions.com/podfics/create%20:%20detonate/04%20create%20_%20detonate%20-%20January.mp3)

+

+

“No, no, no, this is a horrible idea, no, what the hell was I thinking?” Tasha mutters. Lets herself be wrangled down the hallway by her bodyguard anyway. “Nooooo!”

Stepping up the bucket list and helping Winter defeat HYDRA had sounded like an awesome plan. Right up until she realized that step one of said plan would have to be talking to Pepper. Face to face. In a private setting, where Pepper can actually yell at her to her heart’s content. Pepper can yell a lot. And at impressive volume. And a lot. Really, very a lot.

And after four months of avoiding the other woman like the plague, Tasha might deserve it. Possibly. That’s even worse.

“Please?” she tries, grabbing for the nearest doorjamb and holding on. Winter karate swipes her elbows away and just keeps moving her like she’s a sack of flour instead of a fully-grown woman fighting for her life. Or her dignity, at least. “I liked you better when you were all confused-puppy nice to me.”

“Did not,” he retorts, because since they made an enemy of one of the most powerful men in the world together, he’s been snarky as fuck at her and forgotten anything he may have remembered about personal boundaries. Which, fair. She started with the snuggling.  
“I have created a monster.”

“That happened long before you were born,” he parries and then gives her a last whack between the shoulder blades to send her careening into the living room.

“I hate you,” she snaps at him and then rounds to smile and wave at Pep, who doesn’t look amused. At all. “Hi, Peps, how’s it going?”

And here it comes. Pepper draws a deep breath, crosses her arms under her chest and lets loose. “How is it going? How is it going, Tasha!? You tell me how it is going! Four months ago, Obie died and you disappeared, leaving me to try to run your company without anyone’s help _or_ the authority I needed to do anything! You just disappeared and left me to pick up the mess! I didn’t even know what the hell you were doing, if you were okay, if you were still _alive_! JARVIS wouldn’t talk to me, beyond sending me something every now and then, Rhodey and Happy knew nothing and you were just _gone_! It was Afghanistan all over again, Tasha! How could you do that?! What kind of asshole do you have to be, to simply lock everyone you know out of your life and barricade yourself inside your own house for _months_ , without giving anyone a chance to talk to you! I should just _quit_ , you inconsiderate _bitch_!”

She deserves this. Pepper is actually using a bad word, red in the face and incandescent with anger that’s really just worry and hurt and Tasha deserves this.

“I thought you were dead, Tasha! _Again_!”

That, too.

“It was right after Obie and you were so screwed-up and until you started popping up at SI again - _and avoiding me_ \- I really thought JARVIS would call to notify me of your death any day! I thought I’d have to find your dead body in the workshop!”  
And that.

“If you ever, ever pull anything like that again, I will _murder_ you. And then I’ll quit for real!”

That as well.

And then Pepper throws her arms around Tasha and squeezes tightly enough to hurt her chest and Tasha hates herself a little for what she did to her friend. For what she is about to do.

“I’m sorry, Pep,” she murmurs into a riot of red hair, quietly and carefully and takes the pain in her chest from pressure on the reactor casing as her due punishment for being an asshole.

The other woman nods slowly. Lets go. Pulls herself together in under a minute, frighteningly efficient, as always. Then the redhead finally acknowledges Winter, hanging back quietly. He’s dressed in black jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. Charcoal instead of black, Tasha bargained for half an hour for that. His hair is swept into a low ponytail and his hands, flesh and metal alike, are hidden under leather gloves. He looks vaguely threatening and unfairly hot.

“Who’s that?” her PA asks, surreptitiously dabbing under her eyes and then straightening visibly. Business again. Tasha waves him over.

“Bandit, meet Pepper Potts, the most amazing PA ever. Pep, meet James Winter, my new bodyguard.” And then, less showy, “He’s part of what’s going on.”

They shake hands. It’s all very civilized. Then Pepper turns back to her. “Bodyguard? Since when do you need a live-in bodyguard?”

Because they both know, as much as they love Happy, he’s really kind of awful at his job. The security portion of his job his always been more for his ego, than for Tasha’s actual safety. She’s never wanted security before. Needed it, sure, but she’s always counted on her own wits to get her out of a tight spot and never wanted a gorilla looming over her shoulder, proving to the chauvinist assholes she works with that she’s too weak to look after herself.

Tasha practiced her speech on why she changed her mind and how Winter is different for half an hour.

What she actually says, now, is something completely different. “Come on,” she orders, pointing toward the sofa and leading the way.

They sit. They wait for her to talk.

“I… do you remember when I said there had to be a reason I survived?” she finally asks, hand going to the reactor, biting her tongue hard to swallow, _even though I didn’t survive at all_.

Hesitantly, Pepper nods. She, at least, knows what this kind of conversation costs Tasha.

“So, I may have found that reason. There is… there is something bad happening, Pep, and I can help make it go away. I can…,” she recoils from the words ‘fix it’, because there is no fixing what HYDRA has done, but she needs to phrase it somehow, “help make it better. Winter is a part of that. We look after each other and we work together. That’s why he’s here, okay?”

It’s not true. Not really. Reason, purpose. Those are for heroes. Tasha is no hero and she doesn’t believe in redemption. In amends. She believes… Tasha is no hero. But this is a version, some small sliver of something like truth, that Pepper can accept. Because Pepper is good and full of faith in the world and she believes in reasons. In purposes. So that’s what Tasha gives her, in the hope that the woman won’t spit on her grave a few months from now, hating her.

Another nod. “Is it dangerous?”

No sense in lying. “Yes.”

“Is it going to get you killed?”

Not if the palladium does her in first. “It might.”

“Can I convince you to let it be?”

“No.”

The redhead nods, quiet and solemn. “What do you need me to do?”

“What makes you think…,” Tasha trails off at the sharp look she receives.

“I know you, Tasha, and I know that you could have kept up the disappearing act indefinitely. What do you need?”

Quick, efficient and to the point. There was a reason Tasha hired the woman all those years ago. She grabs a wrapped parcel from the coffee table and passes it to her friend. “Merry belated Christmas and I am terribly sorry.”

Pepper unwraps silently, opens the box inside, leafs through the contract, signed by all parties but one. Startled, she turns back to Tasha. “Are you… are you giving me your company?”

“No. I’m still majority shareholder, that isn’t changing.” At least not yet. Not until her will is read. “I am, however, making you CEO of my company. Come on, Peps, you’ve been faking my signature for years. Now you can just sign ‘Potts’ and it’ll even be legal. It won’t even really change anything. You’ve been running SI for a long time. I just do what you tell me to. And now, you won’t have to tell me anymore. You can just do it yourself, and probably do it better to. Awesome, right? Ta-da!”

She might be overselling this, but she really needs Pepper to sign, because if she doesn’t, then SI is going to go to the sharks when she croaks, and they’ll go back to making weapons and that is not acceptable. If Pepper doesn’t sign, Tasha might have to sabotage her own company so no weapon will ever again have ‘Stark’ written on it. Which she would absolutely do, make no mistake. But she wouldn’t enjoy it. Not like she’s going to enjoy kicking Fury’s ass, or wiping HYDRA off the face of the Earth.

Pepper’s nose scrunches in that adorable way it does when she’s thinking hard. Uh-oh. “Why now? Why not four months ago?”

“Uhm… believe it or not, ‘let’s give away my company’ is not my first thought when I’m busy.” That, and she didn’t get around to having the papers drawn up until November. After that, it was just procrastination. She thought she still had time, after all. Didn’t expect to make an enemy of the King of the Spies and pick up someone else’s vendetta on the way.

Pep nods, picks up the contract and stands. “We’ll finalize this tomorrow at the… in my office, in front of witnesses. And don’t think I didn’t notice that you’re distracting me with your company,” she decrees, already every inch the boss Tasha never wanted to have. “But I’ll let you off the hook for today. Will that be all, Miss Stark?”

And that’s…. they’re not okay. Tasha cut her best friend out of her life for four long months and she only let her back in because she needed her. She fucked up. More epically than usual and this time, she probably won’t be able to fix it. Won’t live long enough to grovel properly. But this, Pepper asking that old question with a small smile on her face, that means that Pep doesn’t hate Tasha. It means there’s hope.

It means the other woman hasn’t given up on her, yet.

It’s enough for Tasha. More than.

One less regret when she dies.

She smiles back and doesn’t hug her again as she answers, “That will be all Miss Potts.”

The new CEO of Stark Industries nods, shakes Winter’s hand again. “It was nice to meet you, Mr. Winter. We should get together and talk dirt about Miss Stark at some point.”

Winter nods, smirking. “We should.”

Tasha whines under her breath.

Then Pepper Potts takes her too-good self and her five inch heels back to SI, leaving Tasha to stare after her and not say, “Forgive me for what I’m about to do.”

Or worse yet, “Goodbye.”

Instead she turns to the assassin waiting patiently by her side and asks, “How about we blow some shit up?”

+

“I think I left the oven on,” Tasha says, the suit’s mechanics rendering her voice genderless and flat.

Winter turns back from his vantage point, stares at her. There is a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, which is terribly unprofessional of him, but also unfairly sexy, damn him. She’s tried to explain smoking in the twenty-first century to him, but he just got confused over why society tries to dictate how he harms his own body and she couldn’t really argue that because let’s face it, if it’s chemical and doesn’t kill you, Tasha has tried it. He takes a last drag, throws it away, stubs it out with his boot. Ready to roll. Goddamn.

They are in Wisconsin. Well, Iron Man and the Winter Soldier are. Tasha Stark and her new bodyguard and being sighted enroute to New York, courtesy of JARVIS and his exemplary hacking skills. The last time Tasha checked, he had dozens of fake tumblr, facebook and twitter accounts with histories solid enough to make just about anything they post credible and then, within hours, viral.

If JARVIS tells the internet Tasha Stark has been sighted at LAX, you damn well better believe she has.

Anything to keep Iron Man and Tasha separate. She’ll need it, for what she’s about to do.

Winter keeps staring at her, as if he can discern anything from a hunk of metal. Waiting, she realizes too late, for her to pull back. Get out and cut her losses. So far, this has all been theoretical. In thirty minutes it won’t be.

She considers it. Turning around, taking off. Flying to New York, spending her last few months tinkering in the lab, pretending she’s never heard about a man who is a one-armed ghost.

But, but, but. Winter can’t take on SHIELDRA alone and they have Stark weapons and Nick Fury made Tasha _afraid_.

Rolling her shoulders, she shakes her head. “Nevermind. JARVIS can totally turn it off for me.”

Winter nods. “Stay here. Wait.”

And then he’s gone, jogging into the darkness of an unpopulated area at midnight. Above them, stars wheel prettily. It reminds Tasha of Afghanistan, the night after she fought her way out. The cool was welcome, but the vast darkness of the desert at night made her feel like she’d already died.

Via comm link, she hears an old wooden door swing open. With the suit’s infrared vision, she can see her partner entering the old farm house through the back door.

“Upstairs,” she provides, “probably asleep. Lying down, at any rate.”

Winter doesn’t react, just adjusts his course, enters the bedroom on silent feet. Closes the door and stands, very still, at what is probably the end of the bed for long minutes. A shadow in the dark, looming like a nightmare. Tasha doesn’t have to imagine what the man in the bed will see when he wakes. She knows.

“Is this gonna take long?”

Her answer are two quiet raps on wood. A polite knock, wake up, death is here!

To his credit, Michael Schüler comes awake instantly and alertly. He scrambles for something, a weapon probably, and Winter disarms him like Tasha takes things from Dummy. A single motion, no hesitation, no resistance.

Schüler stills. “What do you want?”

Not, “Who are you?” He’s not very good at pretending to be a helpless elderly man, retired on a farm.

A click. It’s the lock on the new mask Tasha made Winter, on his request. One that lets him speak but keep his face hidden. “Do you know my face, Dr. Schüler?” he asks, his voice colored in an accent that’s not real. Not anymore.

Hesitation. A sharp inhale. Whatever the man did for SHIELD for thirty years, he’s a shitty liar. “No.”

“Liar.”

“No, please, I have no idea who you are! What do you want?!”

Clothes rustling. Winter moving. Stripping, she understands after a moment. A gasp. “Your father helped do this to me, Dr. Schüler. I need to know what you know.”

Something changes. In Schüler. In what he sees, because the next time Tasha hears him speak, he doesn’t sound afraid at all anymore. He sounds amazed. “He told me about you. Good Lord, I never thought… He said you were almost immortal, but I never really believed… but you don’t even look thirty. He developed the technology to graft the metal onto your nerve endings. Is it true you can control the arm like a real limb?”

A scientist excited over a project, a creation. Something they made. Something they built. It’s pride, it’s arrogance, it’s the way you look at something you own, proprietary and possessive. My car. My house. My secret weapon. The way you look at a _thing._

“I’m sorry,” Tasha blurts. “If I ever sounded like that while talking about your arm, I am so sorry.”

Of course, there’s no answer.

“Your father told you. Taught you. About HYDRA.”

“Yes.” Eager. “He told me the day would come when the Hydra rises again, but I didn’t think… I didn’t really believe it anymore. Is that why you’re here? Is there something you need me to do for you? Your arm…”

“No.”

A beat. “Oh, then what…?”

“Tell him you need to destroy everything he has on HYDRA. That there’s someone coming for him. He’ll fall for it.” He sounds like a fanboy, someone completely convinced of what he’s saying. Of HYDRA and its mission. Hail fucking HYDRA.

She doubted. In some tiny fraction of her mind, right up until this second, she doubted. That HYDRA lived, that it was active. That it was SHIELD. Some miniscule part of her thought they’d end tonight on a bust and go home, vendetta done.

She wants to throw up. It’s fast becoming a theme in her life.

Tinny, she hears Winter repeat her idea. The man swallows it. Blinded by faith, maybe, or just stupid. He was a scientist, not an agent, but this is… how the hell did he live to retire? How did he not get made decades ago? But then, if no-one asks the right questions, he’d have no reason to go blabbing answers. And he does have HYDRA’s secret weapon standing in his bedroom and no reason to assume the Winter Soldier is any more than the tool his father described him as – probably in tall, exaggerated tales, the same way Howard spoke of Captain America. Like something he made.

The two men move downstairs, then into a basement Tasha can’t see. Shielded. Clever. She wonders if the idiot built it, or someone else. Hears paper rustling, a computer booting. Clacks of a keyboard.

“Is that all?”

“Yes. Like I said, I was staring to… I have not worked on much of this for years. Why?”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Why are you – “

Bones snapping make a peculiar sound. The crack of bone is only a part of it. Overlaid is the wet snap and crackle of tearing muscle and tendon, the dampening qualities of flesh and skin. The grinding of pieces pressing together. Before tonight, Tasha only ever heard her own bones breaking, sometimes from stupid stunts, sometimes in the lab. Sometimes when her torturers kicked her too hard in the ribs.

From the outside, she decides, it sounds a bit like someone snapping a breadstick in half.

She breathes through her nose, tries to identify every single smell of the cleansed, filtered air inside the suit. Holds on to that until Winter asks, “I need your help. The computer is strange.”

She takes off almost without conscious thought, lets JARVIS steer them downstairs, where Michael Schüler lies in a heap on the floor, discarded like trash. Winter kicks him onto his side, then grabs his shoulder to push him away from the bank of screens, making room for Tasha. She looks away.

“Jesus, that system is antiquated. Like, the nineties want their setup back. Does that even, nope, of course not. No USB. Fuck me. JARVIS?”

“ _The computer seems to run on an isolated system. I cannot access it at all,_ ” he reports.

Crap. “Look around? See if you can find CDs? Or – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – floppy disks? Little flat squares with a metal part on one side.”

The Winter Soldier – because that’s who he is, mask back in place, a dead body in the corner, nods and gets to work.

+

There are chemicals in the upstairs bathroom that make a nice boom. Alcohol in the living room that makes it flare brighter. Tasha already turned the basement to scrap after wiping the system. Trashed the whole place. Winter put Schüler by the back door, made it look like he tried to run from something. Someone.

Then Tasha sets it all ablaze.

They watch long enough to be sure all evidence of them – of HYDRA – is erased before taking off, Winter Soldier on Iron Man’s back, toward the little derelict private airstrip Tasha found them. The plane waits for them where she put it, ready to take them to Chicago. From there, they’ll get to New York by car. A little sleight of hand, and everyone will believe Tasha arrived via plane from LAX.

She concentrates on that, on making the timetable. Checking all systems, taking off. Keeping her steady. Landing. Moving unseen. Keeping the suit – newly compressed into a case, get it _suit case_ \- out of sight.

She keeps moving, moving, moving, tunnel vision behind too big sunglasses, her new bodyguard carrying her bags, such a gentleman, until they arrive at her father’s manor and the doors slam closed behind them.

The place is clean, of course it is, even though she hasn’t set foot in it in over a decade, preferring hotel rooms over this tomb whenever she’s in town. It’s a shrine. Obie used it, sometimes and she wonders if she’ll find any more entombed weapons in the hidden nooks and crannies, any ghosts besides those she left here, a little girl with crooked pigtails and perpetually burnt fingers from circuits not meant for curious six-year-olds distracting themselves from their father’s drunken rambling.

“JARVIS?” she asks.

“ _Secure_ ,” is all he says, all he knows she needs to hear right now. The next moment she’s sinking to the black and white checkered floor, falling into herself, hands clutching at her aching chest. It’s weird. She only changed the core out yesterday, but it _hurts_.

“Tasha?”

She blinks twice and Winter is sitting in front of her, his legs long on either side. Like two children sitting in the yard in summer, they stay there, staring at each other, for a long time.

“What’s wrong?”

Sometimes he reminds her of a little boy, clueless and curious and entirely uncomprehending of the atrocities and complexities of this world. They just murdered a man and burned his corpse together and he doesn’t understand what’s wrong with her.

With a chocked chuckle, she answers, “Nothing. Just came to the belated realization that I’m not a very good person.” She half expects him to argue, to tell her what Pep and Rhodey and so many others have. You’re a good person, Tasha. You’re just being stupid, Tasha. And all the while, she knew that they were lying to spare her feelings. But Winter doesn’t work like that.

“Neither am I,” he points out, very quietly. His hands have wandered to her knees, one warm one cool. She doesn’t notice the contrast anymore, not really. It’s simply part and parcel of him, by now.

Some days, she can’t quite remember what life what like without her six foot shadow.

“Bullshit,” she snaps, reflexively, because it is. Utter _bullshit_. “No bad thing you ever did was your choice.”

“Tonight was.” So he does understand what this is about.

“Yeah,” she acknowledges, “and it took seventy years of torture to get you this far.” And because she knows he won’t get it, she adds, “You know what my first thought was when I figured out what the chair was for? The drugs? It wasn’t ‘oh my god, this is horrible’, wasn’t ‘what have they done to him’. It was ‘this would be amazing’. I found the tools they used to brainwash you and I thought that was a spectacular idea because it could make me forget about all the ugly truths that turned my life to shit. I thought how nice it would be to be able to forget, to go back to being the numb, stupid bitch I was before, killing people by the thousands and not giving a flying fuck. That’s not what good people do.”

+

She really believes that.

He sits on the cold floor with her, watches her face twisted in agony over what she thinks she is and isn’t, and knows she really believes she is a bad person. Because she considered, for a few moments, an escape from the nightmare her life has become. Because her first thought was for herself and not a complete stranger.

Because she’s human.

He knows she thinks he doesn’t understand a lot of things, and she’s right. Emotion escapes him. But he is fully capable of observing human behavior and he understands that Tasha Stark is the best person he can remember meeting. Not entirely good perhaps, certainly not pure or innocent, but the best.

She saved him. She gave him choice. And when choice becomes too much, she takes over, waltzes right over him and gives him time to catch his breath. He has heard her reasoning for why she’s going after HYDRA, the weapons, her new grudge against Fury. It’s all a smoke screen. He’s fully aware of that, even if she isn’t.

He asked her for help and she’s working herself to the bone to give it to him. Because he asked, because, he has learned in the past few months, once Tasha Stark considers you one of hers, she’ll move heaven and hell for you and Winter, well. Whatever he is, whatever is left of him, is hers.

But none of these things will move her, will even reach her. So he just grabs her hands, rolls into a crouch had pulls her to her feet. “I don’t care,” he tells her, as decisively as he can. “I don’t give a flying fuck.”

As he knew it would, the expletive makes her laugh. She stumbles into his side and he swings her up, into his arms.

“Bridal style again?” she teases, a bit flat, but with honest effort.

“Be glad I didn’t carry you over the threshold. Which way?”

“Upstairs. Pick any room that isn’t the master suite. I am not sleeping in my dead parents’ bed. Not for all the cool toys in the world.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She snorts, buries her face in his neck and holds on tight.

It’s enough.

+

“Well,” Brock announces, kicking at a piece of debris, scorched in a circular pattern that is typical for Iron Man’s blast weapons. It’s the only evidence thy have, but it’s enough. “I’d say we’re done with the threat assessment part. What do you think, Cap?”

Steve, sighs, shields his eyes to watch a pair of solemn agents carry an empty stretcher away from the site. There wasn’t enough left of Agent in Retirement Schüler to need a stretcher. Teeth, Steve heard tell, some bone fragments. Nothing else.

Iron Man is definitely not a hero.

“Yes,” he answers. “I guess we are.”

+

Tasha sleeps. Winter doesn’t.

Instead he maps the perimeter of this new base, the exits and entry points, weak spots. JARVIS helps, using newly installed equipment to show him the places he knows the assassin will want to test.

They spend most of the night that way, walking. Guarding their mistress as she sleeps. Winter knows Tasha would yell at him if he ever called her that out loud, would scream her head off about slavery and agency and choices and she’s not fucking HYDRA, thanks a fucking lot.

He knows all that. He also knows that Tasha is all he knows. Maybe she won’t be, one day, but for now she is and he thinks of her as a mixture of commanding officer, handler and _Tasha_. Something hard as steel and randomly, unbearably kind. His leader. Mistress is as good a word as any for it, even if he will never use it outside the privacy of his own head.

As he moves, he finds a balcony on the second floor that overlooks the garden, bathed in moonlight. It’s gorgeous and terribly empty. He digs around his pockets for a cigarette, lights it with his left, less clumsy than he used to be. Inhales. He remembers this. Smoking. The mechanics of it. Did it sometimes on missions, to blend in. Remembers that it wasn’t permitted around bony elbows, for some reason. He doesn’t know why. It calms his mind. Tasha showed him, reminded him. Sometimes, she watches him. It’s a simple act. Quiet. Still. A forced break. He lets his thoughts curl like smoke, lets the night air wake him. Clarity.

When he is done, he buries the stub in a flower pot, automatically erasing all traces of his presence. Back inside, he wanders. Finds photographs. Many of them are magazine covers, newspaper clippings. Some are family pictures. In all of them is a small, solemn child with dark eyes and darker hair. Sometimes she smiles, waves, shows off some machine or another, a tool. She appears happy but her eyes are always the same. They never sparkle.

An older man stands by her side most often. He seems proud. A woman is there, too, sometimes, a carbon copy of Tasha with more laugh lines and less worry lines. She wears demure dresses and pearls. Howard and Maria Stark do not look nearly magnificent enough to have produced offspring the likes of Natasha.

“Crap, you found the wall of shame,” Tasha announces from behind him. He doesn’t jump, makes a mental note to teach her to move more quietly. Although that’s probably a lost cause. Her reactor hums, not loudly, but loud enough in a house ringing with echoes and ghosts.

“Shame?”

She shrugs, unwilling or unable to explain her own quip. JARVIS takes over, “ _It is customary for people to pretend their childhood pictures shame or embarrass them. A strange cultural phenomenon._ ”

Tasha snorts. “Way to make the human race sound like a behavioral experiment, JAR.”

“Is it right?” he asks before the two can derail into one of their petty fights over phrasing.

With a frown, she changes the subject completely, asks, “Why do you do that? You treat JARVIS like a person, you talk to him for hours, but you still refer to him as ‘it’.” She sounds defensive, angry. Like she is ready and willing to defend the machine she built to the death. Like he imagines a mother would fight for her child. Before he can try to justify his word choice, the child in question pipes up.

“ _It is quite alright, Ma’am. We have discussed the issue at length and I know no offense is meant._ ”

That was a long, complicated night, the voice calm and patient, and Winter floundering to put into words what boils down to _machines and weapons have no names and no genders. They are functional_.

JARVIS understood, after a long time. “ _You think of yourself as a thing,_ ” he realized. The surprise in his voice hurt.

“Tasha assures me I am a person,” he retorted. It was all he had. He is getting better, though. Maybe, one day, the voice will be male and Winter will be a person. A real boy, Tasha calls it, her smile gentle and warm.

She drops the subject now with a shake of her head. “Come on. I wanna show you something.”

They make their way quietly through long, confusing corridors until Tasha stops in front of a specific door and turns to him. “If it gets too much, you tell me. If you want out, you leave. If you need to talk, ask questions, whatever, you do. Clear?”

It’s not a suggestion. He nods.

“Good. Then welcome to my father’s neurosis, laid out in red, white and blue.” With that, she pushes open the ornate door and waves him through. The room beyond is… blinding.

Red, white and blue, as she said. The walls are plastered over with posters in various styles, some framed, some not. All of them depict a man in a flag-themed suit, holding a shield, charging into battle, saluting the artist. Sometimes, there are other men behind him, in army colors, following in his wake. Sometimes a tall, statuesque woman stands at his side, slightly behind. All of them look impossibly straight-backed and patriotic. The room itself is filled with display cases and cabinets. There are figurines, shelves full of comics, a weapons display, parts of a soldier’s kit. Patches of faded cloth, a pair of boots, well worn. There are more things in the far corner, covered by a sheet. He is grateful. What he can see is already overwhelming. And the photographs.

There are many, many photographs. They dot the spaces between other memorabilia, are lined up in front of books and comics on the shelves. All of them are black and white. All of them have the same man in the flag-outfit.

Most of them also have his own face, on frank display with short hair. He smiles in most, laughs in a few. He looks so young.

“Babe?” Tasha asks, careful and quiet. Like one would speak at a funeral. This room is a shrine to the dead and he is one of its ghosts.

When he turns to look at her, he realizes he’s made his way through half the room. His hands are resting on the glass of a case filled with stand-up picture frames. Inside are childhood pictures. He feels… not embarrassed, as Tasha thinks one ought to. Viscerally horrified and grateful at the same time, perhaps.

He finds himself in the tall boy’s face, his carefree grin blinding the camera. By his side is the man from the other pictures, but he’s not big, is not strong. Instead he is a wisp of a boy, short and frail and thin-boned.

_Bony elbows._

He knows, without asking, that the boy’s eyes are blue. Were blue. They were blue, because Bucky Barnes was born in 1917 and Steve has been lost for so long. Bucky always knew that he would outlive Steve. The other boy was so breakable and sickly, his asthma getting worse with every cold, damp winter. He knew that one day, he would wake up and Steve wouldn’t be there anymore, would be in a cold, deep grave next to his mother and father in a cemetery Bucky hated, because it was so poor and sad.

He thought it might be different, for a while, during the war. Thought he’d have to leave Steve behind, would never get to go home and see that kid’s ugly mug again. He worried about Steve all alone in the world. Knew that he would try to take care of Bucky’s parents and sisters and probably work himself into an even earlier grave.

And then Steve went and got himself super-sized simply so Bucky wouldn’t get to die first and it was awful and wonderful. When Bucky fell, all he could think was that at least he didn’t have to watch Steve die and that’s the problem with loving someone, isn’t it? One of you always has to die first.

Worse, one of you has to die last.

He comes to on the floor, much like Tasha earlier, only his back is pressed against a random cabinet and he has a hundred and thirty pounds of inventor in his lap, her knees digging into his hips, her arms wrapped around his neck and head. His face is buried in her chest and he smells metal and sweat and Tasha; inhales.

Hears her talking, low and soothing. “… and I hoped like hell this would do nothing. Just, you know, pictures. I hoped you wouldn’t remember and how selfish is that? I just want you to be okay and this can’t be… god, I keep trying to imagine what this must feel like, but I have a nearly eidetic memory and I’ve never forgotten a thing in my life and to have all of this coming back, your head must be about to explode and I’m probably not helping at all, just tell me when you need me to shut up and I will, I swear, I’m not good at consoling people, I don’t know if you’ve noticed. Actually, scratch that, I’m just not good at people. I like to build my friends in my lab.”

“Maybe,” he interrupts her, “that’s why we get along. I came out of a lab, too.” There is a beat of silence and he knows, without raising his head, that she’s wondering whether to laugh or be horrified. “And Tasha?”

“Yes?”

“Shut up.”

She settles on laughing. It’s why he loves her. When she’s done, she presses a kiss to the crown of his head and starts combing her fingers through his hair, letting him stay still. Letting him hide as long as he needs to. He turns his head fractionally, lets the light of the reactor blind him from so close. Let’s the smell of sickness and electricity lull him. This is real. This is now. Tasha is real, is flesh and steel and dying warmth.

“The picture you gave me,” he says after a while, just starts talking. “had Steve after the serum. He wasn’t… to me, he never stopped being the little twig who constantly picked fights. Big Steve didn’t register. And then I saw little him and it all came back. Or… not all of it. But enough. A lot.”

He can’t remember much about his parents, apart from his mother’s home perm, smelling of chemicals and his father’s hands, bent and crooked from decades in the factory. Mostly it’s Steve, front and center and larger than life, even when he barely reached Bucky’s chin.

Bucky. He remembers being Bucky.

It feels weird as hell.

“Make sense,” Tasha decrees. “You’re being awfully calm.”

He won’t be as soon as she lets him go. As soon as she takes away that one anchor he has, her weight on top of him, her voice telling him what to do. As soon as she lets go, it’ll be only him and the carnage in his head and he’ll go mad. He can feel it welling inside of him, the panicfearconfusion and the only thing holding it down is the tingle in his legs where Tasha’s weight presses down hard and the tug on his scalp where she pulls his hair while carding through it.

“Just don’t let go,” he begs, voice small.

A beat of silence.

“Make me,” she challenges, shifting forward on his lap, pressing even closer. He can barely breathe and the ringing in his head sounds distant and tinny. Unimportant. In his memory, Steve tells him not to be so dramatic and Tasha holds him still.

It’s wonderful.

+

Twenty-four hours later they’re in the basement, putting up JARVIS’ hardware and the machinery Tasha needs for her armor. The AI, meanwhile, is busy working with what was on those floppy disks, now that he can read them.

It’s embarrassing – for HYDRA, that is - to have tech so old, it’s not even compatible with her systems. She needed to go on _amazon_ and buy an external drive with a USB port. For shame, really.

Winter has been acting... freer all day. So much so, that Tasha is trying to work out a way to ask if he’s going back to being Bucky. It’s like the last pieces of his personality Tetris have slotted into place and he’s even got a hint of New York in his vowels now. She’s sad, honestly, to hear the Russian go. No-one’s ever pronounces her name quite like he did.

Her baby duckling tiger is growing up so fast.

She pauses in her work for a moment, watches him heave a mobile server into the far corner, where the cooling unit is already waiting for it. “How’s the arm, sugar buns?”

Since he’s taking most of the weight with his left and not even looking winded, she figures the answer is ‘good’, but he frowns as he puts his load down, rotates his shoulder. “The sensory feedback goes haywire when I put too much pressure on it. It’s… annoying.”

She grimaces. “Yeah. I’m happy to blame that on the port, though. I… there might be a way to fix it, but you’d need neurosurgery for that. Want me to look into it?”

She worked with what she had, on his current arm, and it’s a ton better than the last one, circa 1950, but far from perfect. As much as she hates to admit it, there’s no better engineer than mother nature. Not even Tasha Stark can recreate flesh and blood. “I did get somewhere with the synth skin, though. Wanna see?”

Not waiting for his reply, she’s already pulling up the models. He surprises her again when he shakes his head. “Nah.” – Another thing. He’s getting all sloppy with his language. It’s adorable. “Don’t want the skin. I like the metal. No point in hiding.”

That… makes her heart swell three sizes, goddamn. She looks down at her chest where the reactor is glowing brightly above her plunging neckline. “Shit,” she mutters, “You’re perfect. No shame at all.”

He beams at her and it’s almost boyish. “Steve was like that, too,” he tells her, with the air of someone testing out words. Like he’s not entirely sure, but it’s falling into place as he talks. “No shame, always pushing, pushing, pushing.”

“Doesn’t sound like what my old man described.”

“Howard knew Captain America, I think. Steve… he was tiny, before the serum and he picked fights all the time, even though he knew he couldn’t win. He was a little shit.” A proud grin. “You would have liked him.” He sounds so utterly convinced of it that Tasha simply shrugs, refrains from answering. Let’s him have it.

“What’s it like, having all that back?”

He smiles brightly. “Hurts. But it’s mine.”

It’s so terribly cheesy that she rolls her eyes at him. Hard. He sticks his tongue out and she rolls her eyes again and it would probably deteriorate from there, if JARVIS didn’t interfere with a politely amused, “ _If you are quite done, I have finished sorting the information from the floppy disks_.” He says ‘floppy disks’ like a human might say ‘pile of shit’. If he had a nose, it’d be all scrunched up.

“Tech snob!” she accuses, delighted, as always, at her AI acting so goddamn human. “Not everyone has the state of the art shit, buddy, get used to it.”

“ _The encryption was pitiful_ ,” he declares.

“Alright, alright, what have you got?”

“ _A distinct lack of holographic surfaces_ ,” he declares and god, he’s spoiled. Before she can retort, though, the screen to her left flickers to life, displaying a map of, yup, that’s Alaska.

“What’re we looking at?” Winter asks, coming to stand next to her, their shoulders brushing.

The map zooms in on what looks like an oversized hunting cabin in the middle of nowhere. “ _This facility traces back to SHIELD via various aliases and company fronts. Currently, it houses five scientists working on wormhole theory and a rotation of six guards. It is under the purview of Senior Agent Gerard Williams. He has spent large parts of his career in Eastern Europe and the Alpine regions, both of which we know to be areas where HYDRA has maintained a covert but strong presence for decades, thanks to the files Mr. Stane kept._ ”

“How’d you find the place?”

“Incidentally, many of the missives Dr. Schüler received originated at that exact geographical location.”

“Scientists mailing a former colleague is not out of the realm of the, you know, legal and normal.” Tasha argues. She’s playing the devil’s advocate though and they all know it.

“Dr. Schüler was a medical doctor working on bionics theory. These are… doing something else,” Winter points out, reasonably, and obviously not sure what the hell a wormhole is. “Also, why encrypt and hide those conversations? Store them on an isolated system? They were insurance. And that means they’re dirty.”

Tasha concedes the point. “So what? We think this Williams guy has the whole base turned around? Basement full of HYDRA?”

Winter flicks through some scanned files on another screen, handling the tech without effort. It’s sexy. Tasha clears her throat just as he points at something. “All personnel are handpicked by the boss. The guards consist mostly of his former field team. It seems likely.” He looks at the ceiling. “Can you get surveillance on them? Track their messages? We need to be sure.”

“ _Already done, Mr. Winter,_ ” JARVIS assures and flips the screens off.

“Thank you.”

Tasha watches them for a moment, then fondly shakes her head. “Let’s get back to work.”

+

They’re having hot chocolate in Central Park. They’re in jeans and parkas, a horrible flap-eared monstrosity for the One Armed Bandit because he still doesn’t care about his clothes as long as they’re dark and until he develops an opinion on this shit, Tasha is going to subtly poke fun at him. They each have a steaming Styrofoam cup, although Tasha’s, admittedly, is more coffee than hot chocolate. And by ‘more’ she means ‘all’. Caffeine. Yummy. Apart from the paparazzi, the suit case cuffed to Winter’s wrist and JARIVS piping up from time to time through their phones, it’s almost normal.

“I remember this,” Winter announces as they sit at the edge of a fountain, sunglasses jammed onto their faces because it’s freezing, but it’s also sunny. The flaps of his hat are fluttering in the breeze and the fur of Tasha’s hood is twitching in time. It’s so cute she could puke.

But, she figures, might as well go for broke. “My Babushka died when I was five. But I remember her sometimes taking me here. She barely spoke English. And my Pop was Italian. They used to fight in this weird-ass jumble of languages and then start kissing like teenagers in the middle of the kitchen and I laughed and laughed at them. Mom hated when they did that. She was embarrassed by them. They were as working class as they came and she was a _Stark_.” She snorts. Maria and Howard always went on as if that meant something. Being a Stark.

It means shit.

“Is that why your name is Russian?”

She nods. “Yeah. Don’t ask me where the Starks came from, originally. Howard was, like, fifty when I was born. His parents were long dead and he certainly never told me.”

He shrugs. “Hey, I’m from Brooklyn. That’s all I know.” He doesn’t sound haunted by it anymore. Or at least not today, he doesn’t.

“Good enough,” she assures him. And it is.

Suddenly, not paying attention, her cup tilts too far and coffee slops all over her jeans and she curses up a blue streak that makes an outraged nanny drag away a couple of sprogs too young to understand half of what she’s saying. He laughs, grabs the cup from her and balances it so she can do her hot-shit-ow dance. When she’s done, pants given up as a lost cause, he hands it back to her and she frowns at it before chucking it into a nearby trash can.

She shouldn’t have the much caffeine anyway. It’s bad for her health.

But then, hey, she’ll be dead in a couple of months! With a mournful look at the lost goodies, she decides to hell and holds out her hand. “Cigarette,” she orders.

“What?” He takes off his sunglasses, looks at her sharply.

“Cigarette. You’re stinking up the place anyway and there’s no reason not to, so give me a smoke.” Her good mood is ruined, thank you reality, hate you, too.

Winter forks over the smoke, lights it for her like a gentleman. He doesn’t ask. The indignant nanny gives up and tows her tots away entirely.

Tasha smokes in silence for a few minutes. “I just killed the mood, didn’t I?”

“A little, yeah. Want to head back?”

Back to the tomb. Not really. But it’s better than being out here. “You’ve turned me into a hermit,” she accuses without heat.

“I doubt it,” he counters, pulls her to her feet.

“Want to hang out in the Shrine? You can tell me stories about the glory days and I can cyber stalk Pepper a little.” The weird thing is that she says that without a trace of irony.

“It’s a deal.”

The new driver, the one Tasha got when she signed Happy over to Pepper permanently, is waiting for them at the gate, privacy screen already up. He’s perfectly bland and perfectly polite and Tasha suspects him of being a Pepper Plant, but doesn’t outright check because she likes to let her red-headed friend have her reassurances.

Inside the car, she stretches her legs long, knocks her knees into her bodyguard’s. He knocks back, slings his metal arm around her shoulders. Her hair instantly gets caught in the seams, now that he’s taken off his jacket, but she doesn’t care, just leans into him.

It’s not true that he turned her into a recluse, but he did change her. Keeps doing it, like this. Touches her. Lets her be quiet. Makes her do things like spend the night in her father’s psycho worship shrine to Captain America, actually sitting still.

Tasha hasn’t let anyone touch her since Afghanistan and especially not men. Even Rhodey doesn’t get to touch her anymore. But Winter does. Winter ripped Fury away from her and Winter would kill for her and even in the early days, when he choked her regularly, she never feared _that_ from him. He’s a killer, not a rapist. Her heart almost beat out of her battered chest with fear, sometimes, when he surprised her, when he was still more specter of death than person, when he was still too frighteningly blank. He scared her.

But somehow he was still okay to touch her. He slipped in under the wire, somehow.

+

Pepper is interviewing people for the position of PA. For herself. Not for Tasha. Tasha put her foot down, claimed Winter was enough and didn’t explain any more. She scared Pep with it, probably, but there was no way around it.

The camera in front of her office is visual only through the glass walls and Tasha watches on her tablet as six candidates enter and leave just as fast. She makes a game of trying to pick out the flaw that got them eliminated. One is dressed sloppily. One is two minutes late. One wears her blouse unbuttoned in a way you can only pull off if you’re a) in a porno or b) have a bionic implant between you tits. Number four has no obvious disqualifier, but Pepper stares at her CV for thirty seconds before waving her away. Quickly. Number five is escorted off the premises. Number six runs out in tears.

Number seven stays inside the office for seven minutes longer than the longest-lasting contestant so far. She has red hair, which is an automatic plus, and wears killer heels. She also fills that pinstripe skirt really, really well.

“Is that this sexual harassment thing?” the sassy assassin to her left asks. They’ve liberated a mattress from one of the unused rooms because they spend most of their evenings here when they’re not in the labs. Tasha fiddles, Winter goes memorabilia diving.

She has no idea where the blankets came from, though. Or why they’re sitting with their legs all tangled up.

“It’s not sexual harassment when I’m not technically her boss. Also, I’m perving via security camera. That’s… completely different.”

“So much less stalkerish, Tom.”

“I need to restrict your access to the internet.”

“I dare you,” he retorts and with a decisive snap, finishes resembling the old service rifle he found in one of the cabinets. It was lumped in with a whole bunch of Howling Commandos stuff. There are letters carved into the butt. BB.

He sights down the length of it, finger over the trigger.

“Is this thing even still useable?”

He shrugs. “If I can find bullets for it, I can try.”

It’s the work of two minutes to find the right ammunition online and order it. By the time she flicks back to the video feed, Pepper is standing, bent across the desk, shaking the younger redhead’s hand. She looks pleased and from the way the new PA stops on her way out, displays one foot coyly, she also likes the other woman’s shoes.

Oh god, Tasha thinks. There’s two of them now.

+


	5. Februry

+

February

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They miscalculated.

A lot.

The Alaska base, quaintly codenamed ‘Iceberg’ by someone with a very two-dimensional sense of humor, is a lot bigger than they thought. Didn’t she make a joke about this place’s basement only a couple of weeks ago? Shit.

“Hey,” Iron Man pants over comms, “turns out that guy’s sense of humor was maybe slier than I was giving him credit for.”

“Shut up and limp,” the Winter Soldier orders, tracking her progress through the scope of his rifle. Almost, almost, almost.

The plan is… well, maybe not simple, but it’s one where Iron Man doesn’t have to kill a whole lot. At least not in cold blood. It bothers her. It doesn’t bother the Winter Soldier. So he quietly and covertly shifted around their plan until it consisted of her busting in, drawing fire and attention and then pretending to lame, getting out. Making everyone chase her into the open, where he can pick them off one by one, sniper precision.

He is perched on a small slope just beyond the treeline, enough of a vantage point to fire from, but hidden enough to make the shots tricky. His specialty.

So far, so good. But then Iron Man crashed through a few walls, threw around a server or two and instead of six guards, there were suddenly two dozen streaming out of an access point that was not on any plans or surveillance.

“Iceberg,” she cursed as she used two miniature rockets to blast a way out. JARVIS calmly noted three dead and Iron Man kept repeating, “A motherfucking iceberg, you only see the tip, goddamn, I hate this shit. Spies and goddamn secret agents, how do you even.”

She killed seven on her way out, voice going shaky in places, language fouler and fouler. He’s proud of her, of how she held up. Is holding up, still sticking to the plan. It’s not working as well as it should, of course. There’s too many security personnel for all of them to come chasing after her, but of the twenty-nine life signs remaining, eight do give chase.

The Winter Soldier puts down the unsmoked cigarette he’s been chewing on for thirty minutes, keeps breathing normally and marks his path through the hostiles. The ones in the back first, then toward the front. Make their way to safety as long as possible. If they fall over their comrades, try to take them with, even better. It’ll slow them down.

Iron Man is a stark red and gold blur as she hobbles and hops along with small repulsor blasts, pretending to be damaged by a few bullets. The indignity of it made her rant for twenty minutes on their drive up. He listens to her mutter and sweat for a moment longer, then pulls the trigger.

The shot cuts the icy air like a knife. The impact is a dull smack. More red. One down. Breathe normally, sight, fire. Breathe normally, sight, fire. Breathe normally, sight, fire.

Seven of them are down by the time Iron Man reaches the treeline and the chase becomes obsolete, the last hunter hunkered down in the snow, trying to track the sniper.

He has good eyes, sighting _something_ where the Winter Soldier hides, taking aim.

He never fires. Iron Man barrels into him hard enough to break his neck on impact and leaves him fallen in the snow. It’s a familiar sight, broken bodies on a mother’s lawn at dawn, blood in Russian snow, red, white, still forests and wolves howling as he runs with them.

Memory.

He missed it so badly when it was gone.

He pushes it down. Tasha keeps telling him he’ll survive.

“Now what?” Iron Man asks, panting, pointedly not looking at the man she killed. And there is no way he is not dead. The voice tracks life signs and she would not leave the man alive.

“We need to clear the place out before they find a way around JARVIS and call for help.”

“Plan?” She lets him lead in this. Defers to his expertise in murdering people. He will survive this.

He smirks, slinging his rifle over his back and making his way around and down to his partner. “That is the plan.”

They both think best on their feet. She salutes with the wrong hand, grin audible in her voice a she answers, “I like how you think. Let me get the door for you.”

And then she’s off, back inside through the holes she blew. Gunfire immediately starts up again and she returns fire even as he catches up, using the distraction she provides to slip inside and break a man’s neck. He catches his gun as it drops, shoots another two point blank. By then, the enemy catches on that there are two fighters in the fray now, adjusts cover and strategy.

He ducks behind and around a desk, uses the butt of the stolen weapon to cave someone’s temple in and then pauses. Iron Man is standing in the center of what was once an office, deadly still. The agents have stopped firing on her, realizing it’s a waste of bullets.

Slowly, she raises her arms, a whine of machinery announcing a counter attack. “Exterminator’s here,” she chirps, manically chipper, and fires on a bank of overturned desks, causing several people to give up their hiding places in favor of not being blown up.

The Winter Soldier picks off five of them, gets grappled to the ground by a sixth and seventh while Iron Man wades into another fight, punching hard enough to break bones and make people go still. Silent. He isn’t sure if she’s aware that her punches kill, but then, she’s Tasha, underneath, the most brilliant person he has ever, to his knowledge, met.

She knows.

It saddens him, to see her like that, so deadly, so ruthless, but at the same time, it’s beautiful. She’s beautiful, dangerous and deadly, a weapon she built herself, powered by her own heart. Violence looks good on Tasha and he’s not ashamed to admit he likes her this way. It’s not a nice thing, perhaps, but then he’s not a nice person.

He kicks one of his attackers in the knee, making him loosen his grip enough to slip backwards and haul the metal arm back for a punch that breaks a nose and drives bone into the brain.

The other one gets his gun up and he ducks, slips around and breaks his neck before picking up a new gun, sliding his rifle back into place and checking on Iron Man with a single glance. She’s still punching out opponents, heading for the doorway they poured out of.

He follows, gun ready, as they head down the hallway toward the elevator that’s not on any blueprint they could find. It’s open, but locked down, of course. Tasha flies inside, aims her palm repulsors down and fires until the flooring turns to slag. Then she gallantly offers him an arm. “May I escort you down?”

“Are you flirting with me?” he asks, idly, even as he accepts the offer and swings himself around to half ride her back. She takes them down the elevator shaft at least fifty feet, then stops in front of the only other set of doors. They have no idea what lies behind there. The security up top might have been most of it.

Or it might have been a fraction.

“Is it working?” she returns. “Left or right?”

“Left,” he decides, braces his feet against the metal of the suit’s thigh, gets ready to leap, trusting her to compensate.

“Haters to the left,” she intones, nonsensically. “Remember, we need someone alive, okay?”

The she pries open the doors and shoots upwards, toward the ceiling, where most people won’t aim. The Soldier takes in the lay of the land with a single glance, seven man, clustered around the doors, badly covered. A hallway leading in either direction and straight ahead. He ducks, rolls, and kicks the legs out from under his first opponent, breaks his neck as he comes down with barely a flick of his wrist. He really, really loves his new arm.

Tasha has lost all compunction about killing at this point, encountering too much resistance to consider mercy. He saw, late at night, when she was sleeping for once, the satellite footage of what she did to a hillside in Afghanistan. Of what she left there, once her revenge was done.

The voice showed him, quiet and challenging. Showed him images of Syria, too. Tasha Stark might not like killing, but she is awfully good at it, provided she has reason.

“Weapons are what I do, babe,” she told him, once, in the beginning.

And he answered, “I know,” because he did. He knew no other reason then, why she would keep him.

She blasts and punches her way through, hallway too narrow to take flight or use her legs much. He kills at close range, too, making use of the garrote wire hidden in his forearm a few times.

They’re trying to decide which way to go, when JARVIS finally pipes up again. “ _I have found the pertinent information. Apologies for missing it before, it seems purposely misfiled. If you head down your right, you should find the main labs. I have taken the liberty of hacking the surveillance. It appears eight individuals have sought refuge there. To your right are storage facilities and sleeping quarters. Initial scans of the extended personnel show that they, too, were all picked by Agent Williams. Many of them have spent extended periods stationed in Europe._ ” This part, he thinks, is solely for Tasha. For her peace of mind. And, perhaps, for the voice’s own. He is his mother’s son after all.

“ _Agent Williams seems to be headed your way, by the way. He is heavily armed and has three men with him. I suggest preventative action._ ”

“Buddy of mine, we kind of need him alive. Anything tank busting?”

“ _Possibly._ ”

She grins. He can hear it. “Then that’s my stop. You want the labs?”

“Yes,” he tells her. If only so she doesn’t have to. Takes off at a brisk jog.

“Hey,” she calls after him, “you still haven’t answered. Is it working?”

“I don’t put out on the second mission,” he mutters as he crouches, peeks around a corner carefully.

She laughs even as he hears her engines go overtime. “You have adjusted to this century beautifully. Puts a tear in my eye.”

“I had a good teacher,” he admits, rolling out of cover and disabling the grenade someone booby trapped with paper clips and rubber bands. Scientists. Really.

“Now who’s flirting?”

“I meant JARVIS.”

“ _Thank you, sir._ ”

“Aw, you break my heart.”

“He explains things to me,” he argues. Kicks in a door.

“Hey, I explain things! And build you things and-,” a brief silence as something blows up, shaking half the complex. They definitely have tank busters. “…ow, you fucker, that stung! And I take you places! Take that, you grenade launching asshole! I took you to the park! And also, you’re calling JARVIS ‘he’ now! Oh god, put that grenade down, you fucker. Shit! My paint job! Oh, buddy, now I’m pissed with you, you just tried to pry my face off. Who does that?! This is awesome!”

One of the scientists is armed with a weapon. Another has a blow torch in hand. The Soldier stops, raises one hand, placating. “Hail HYDRA,” he announces, disgust curling his lip behind his mask.

The whole gaggle of them visibly relaxes.

They get a bullet each and he makes it back outside in time to see Tasha – and she is Tasha now, there is nothing Iron Man about her anymore, not now that she’s found her equilibrium in the middle of this madness – ride Agent Williams to the ground with both hands around his neck, swearing up a storm at him. Since her external speakers are turned off, only James can hear. To everyone else, she is an eerily silent robot, killing them one by one.

He can’t stand silence during battle. Even before, he needed the chatter with the other Commandos to distract him, just a little, from what he was doing. Killing. When he was the Winter Soldier all the time, a blank slate to fill, he didn’t know how to banter, didn’t have anyone to do it with. He was silent for days, weeks, sometimes months, when the mission was long.

But even if that’s the moniker he uses now, he is not that weapon anymore. He’s… he just thought of himself as James, didn’t he?

It feels… fitting. Old and new. His.

+

Williams gives them several terabytes worth of information. Not voluntarily, but he does give it to them. In return, they do not make him watch as they blow his base to kingdom come with a whole lot of C4 and JARVIS on the trigger.

Tasha flies them back to the car, adrenaline wearing off in both of them, leaving them tired, hollowed and hurt. He’s got two bullet grazes on his arm and thigh and a cut along his forearm. She’s bruised and battered to hell, according to her AI, shaken by the missile she took in the gut.

He thanks a god he doesn’t believe in that the suit held up and when some of the plating sticks as she tries to fold it back into its case, he helps pry it open for her.

Only to have her collapse into his arms, white as a ghost, clutching her chest and breathing hard. He inhales, smells the by now familiar stink of a palladium piece used up and fried.

“Tell me you brought a replacement,” he orders, sitting her down in the open trunk, already scrabbling for the first aid kid they brought. They need to get out of here, but they need her to not die more, so screw it. They’re thirty miles off site and it’ll take SHIELD at least half an hour to get here. Middle of fucking nowhere. He hopes. So far, their intel has been a little bit shit. “Where is it!?”

She waves at him, at the kit. “Little box. Red,” she gasps, shudders, farther gone than he’s ever seen her. He wonders how long she’s been holding the pain in. It must have started during the fight. He didn’t notice.

He finds the box, moves to help her take off her shirt, only to find her curling into herself, muscles cramping. He has no idea what’s hurting her right now, the poisoning that’s been slowly turning her skin into a roadmap of doom, or the reactor giving out, letting the shrapnel in her chest have free reign.

He wonders if it’ll matter, in the end, which one kills her. With or without, she’s dead.

“Tasha, I need you to let me at your chest,” he tells her, voice calm. He’s always calm under pressure. Even when he wants to scream.

Through clenched teeth, she hisses, “Easier said than done.” The next second, she lurches forward. He barely manages to catch her before she falls out of the car, can’t do anything but hold her hair while she throws up. The poisoning then.

By the time she’s done retching, her breaths are shallow and weak and she’s shaking all over, more grey than white. He has to lean her against the car to get her to stay upright and doesn’t bother with finesse, rips her clothes down the middle.

Her breath hitches, eyes going dark with some ugly memory, some horror that makes her wake screaming, frantically searching for the light that keeps her alive. The same horror that made her gasp for breath when Fury leaned over her, his bulk against her seated form. She didn’t react this way the last time he had to rip her clothes off her to get at the reactor, but then she was a lot more aware then.

She bats at his hands, his shoulders and arms, anything she can reach, tries to fight him off when she can barely stay upright.

So he starts talking to her, letting random sentences fall from his lips, their strange jumble of languages, until she stops struggling and, with a sound like a wounded animal, gives in. Or simply can’t find the energy to fight him anymore. He fumbles with the reactor, messes up the twist-turn of unhooking it, takes off his glove, tries again. Finally he gets it loose and manages to switch the palladium core for the new one, plugs it back in and waits.

Waits for her to regain color, to breathe steadily, to not die for just one more day.

“Jesus,” she rasps, after too long of nothing, her voice barely more than a reedy whisper. “Let’s not do that again.”

“Can you stand?”

She tries. Flops into his arms like a limp fish.

He catches her, cradles her in one arm and carefully folds her into the backseat, putting his jacket over her as she starts shivering. Then he packs up their gear and gets in the driver’s seat. Fights to not crack the wheel with his left hand.

Hates her a little, for making him care.

Hates her more, for not caring herself. For not telling him for so long, hiding it again during the battle. The battle. The suit is attached to her reactor. Did the fight cause this? Did she burn through the palladium faster because of his vendetta? He doesn’t know and she’ll lie if he asks her. Because she’s a goddamn martyr and doesn’t even know it. Just thinks she isn’t worth the trouble, the worry. Thinks she doesn’t matter. Thinks…

After a mile, she’s asleep. After ten, she’s a tiny ball of misery in the rearview mirror. After twenty, her hand reaches around his seat, grabs onto his shirt, digs into the skin of his waist. Holds on.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

She’s asleep again by thirty-five.

+

Once more, Iron Man has attacked SHIELD.

Once more, Steve stands in the ruins of what she left. Burnt earth and a hole in the ground. When he asked what used to fill that hole, all he got was hunched shoulders and shifty eyes.

Top Secret. Level 9 clearance.

“How are we supposed to figure out what Iron Man wants, if we don’t know what she’s after?” he asked.

“Captain, your mission is to find and take care of her. Not to understand her.”

Beside him, between the rows and rows of body bags, Trevors whistles irreverently. “Damn, that’s a lot of dead people for one attacker.”

“Two,” Chance corrects, crouched a dozen feet away, on the disturbed ground, red, brown, white. Blood, dirt, snow.

Steve swallows the memories down.

Without prompting, Chance points out what she found. “They laid a trap. Iron Man as bait, here’s footprints, melted snow. Probably limped along, pretended injury. And somewhere back there,” she points toward the treeline, northern edge, “was a sniper waiting to pick off anyone that followed her.”

Brock hisses in annoyance. “Let’s find the nest,” he orders. “Mickey, Rollins, go. Anyone else, start separating those kills. We need to know how our new player moves.”

Steve has absolutely no desire to dig through body bags, to see everything Howard’s daughter has done. What she has turned her father’s legacy into. He slings his shield onto his back, turns to the team leader. “I’m heading out, too. Might find something.”

Knowing better than to let Brock start arguing, he simply takes off at a jog toward the trees, starts working his way around the clearing while the rest of STRIKE Team examines the dead.

There are a lot of places to choose from, for a sniper. The trees are big, sturdy. Good for climbing. Attach yourself to the trunk and you could spend days up there.

But the angles aren’t right. The bullets didn’t come from high up, but hit almost level. Lower than most snipers prefer. But also a spot most trained soldiers wouldn’t look for a sniper in.

It was Bucky’s favorite trick. While the Germans shot into the trees, he was on the ground, invisible because they didn’t even consider that he might be so low. It made his shots trickier, but he liked the challenge.

Steve stops for a moment, head tilted, trying to decide where Bucky would have gone. It might be a bust, but it might also not be. From the sounds of it, neither Trevors nor Rollins have had any luck so far. He can hear them muttering a few hundred yards away.

The land is mostly flat around here, not a lot in the way of natural hills, but there are a few mounds of accumulated forest debris. A few rocks. Someone could…

There.

Picking up his pace, Steve makes his way to a small rise in the topography. It might have been a fallen tree once, covered in decomposing leaves and soil for decades, slowly turning into an incline.

At the very top, the snow is brushed clean, like someone dragged a branch over it to erase traces. But Steve has good eyes and he can make out the small holes where the tripod’s legs dug through the snow cover into the frozen earth beneath. That, and there’s an unsmoked cigarette, rolled to one side, stuck under a few leaves.

He picks it up, studies it. The filter is deformed and discolored. Like someone chewed on it. Bucky used to do that. Couldn’t smoke in the nest, but for him, smoking was always as much something to do as the rush, so if he couldn’t have one, he could have the other. He chewed smokes until he got tobacco stuck between his teeth and Steve almost buckles under the memories.

The snow, the cold, the dead. The small rise, the tripod, the brush, the cigarette. Bucky, Bucky, Bucky.

But Bucky is dead.

Has been dead, for far longer than he ever was alive.

But then who is copying his signature?

Steve tries to swallow down the desperate, wild hope that blooms in his chest the same way he swallows the memories, day after day.

In his clenched fist, the cigarette falls to pieces.

It doesn’t work.

+

“You know I’m not dead yet, right?” Tasha asks, tongue in cheek. Winter grunts and keeps moving, steadily, down the hallway. They’ve already made pit stops in the kitchen for some necessary chow and the bathroom, where he stripped them both and then more or less hosed them down.

He washed her hair. If he hadn’t looked so damn blank the whole time, it would have been funny. Well, that and the part where her hair kept getting caught in the seams of his arm.

And now he’s carrying her upstairs, to Howard’s shrine. She’s getting used to being lugged around bridal style. That’s bad news. But since she’s not sure she could make the stairs on her own at the moment, well.

She doesn’t think she’ll survive this.

His expression turns impossibly darker at her quip, then clears into a smirk. He smirks now. It’s a thing. She’s so fucking proud of him. “You sure? You smelled like it earlier?”

“Meh. I’m all clean now. You should know. You did the scrubbing.”

With her pink loofa.

He keeps up the happy face for a moment longer, before turning the last corner and quietly offering, “It’s reached past your shoulders.”

The black, he means. The poison. Tasha grins, all her teeth on display, and reaches out, opens the door automatically as he stops and then ducking her head into his shoulder. Getting way too used to this.

He puts her down on the Mattress of Lazy Evenings, gently. He is so gentle with her. She shuffles until she’s sitting against a display case, pulls the blanket over her lap and fishes a tablet out from below the edge of the mattress.

Winter watches her until he’s satisfied she’s not going to keel over, then wanders off toward the corner with the sheet-covered stuff. While he’s poking around, Tasha fiddles idly, not really awake enough to get any work done. Besides, she’s almost finished with the List. Not much left to do now.

Laying down, she watches Winter pull a few model boards away from the wall and place them flat on the floor, studying them.

“It’s a scale model of the last Stark Expo. Pretty, huh? My old man missed my fifth birthday for this.” And all of her others for other reasons. But it’s not like she’s bitter, or anything.

“Neat,” he decides, after a moment. “But Howard always did have an eye for design.”

With a grunt, Tasha rolls to her feet, weaves over and leans into her bodyguard’s side, to look at her father’s legacy. It is neat.

A central stage, with pavilions placed in a symmetrical pattern all around it, rides and attractions in between. Even the concession stands follow a pattern.

As a matter of fact…

… it almost looks like…

… “Well _fuck me_ ,” she blurts, dropping to her knees right by the boards. Winter makes a move to catch her until he realizes it’s intentional. Then he comes down right beside her.

“What’s going on? Tasha?”

“That’s…it can’t be… but that crafty old goat… I can’t believe this, help me get those down to the lab.”

“What? Why?”

Another change: he doesn’t follow orders blindly anymore.

“Just help me, One Arm!”

+

“JARVIS, scan, and on the big holo, blow it up. Blow it up _big_.”

A moment later Tasha stands in front of the model board, surrounded by a sphere of blue light that looks…

“Oh, you long-dead son of a bitch,” she snarls, holding on to a table to keep from keeling over. “JARVIS, run the usual sims. I swear, if the old goat weren’t dead, I’d kiss him. Maybe kill him. But definitely kiss him first. This is the best thing since vodka ice-cream and AIs and threesomes with Swedish supermodels and I never thought I’d say this without irony like whoa, but thank you old man, you were a brilliant fucker and I adore you right now. It’ll pass, no doubt, but right now,” she takes a deep breath. “Thank you, Dad.”

Through the blue shimmer of hope, Winter looks on, amused, confused and terribly fond.

“What is it?”

“It’s an element. And not one I’ve ever seen before. Something new.”

“Something you haven’t tried with the reactor yet?”

She smiles at him, real and bright and painless, the way she hasn’t in far too long. “Smart cookie,” she praises.

And then he steps through the blue and hauls her in by the shoulders, wrapping his arms around her and squeezing. She can feel his breath against her neck, his hair tickling her ear, can feel him, warm and solid and _close_. Holding on with sheer relief. They don’t even know if this is viable, yet, don’t know if it will work, but he’s holding on to her like he wants to never let go.

Oh.

“Oh.”

Silly, silly, imprinted duckling tiger.

“I called myself James today,” he tells her, suddenly, speaking into the skin of her neck.

“What?”

“I called myself James. It’s… it’s my name. It feels like my name. Now. Again.”

She finally, finally wraps her arms around him, buries her fingers in his thick hair. “Does that mean I can call you Jamie, babe?”

That makes him draw back, a grimace on his face. “If you must,” he sighs, terribly put-upon and Tasha thinks, again, _oh_ , because she’s obviously not firing on all cylinders and there’s an element her father hid in plain sight and a man who, last she checked, considered himself an ‘it’, reclaiming a name he lost decades ago and oh god, he’s a dumb fucking duckling and so is she, because she imprinted right back at him.

So she does what Tasha Stark must always do. She scrapes together the remains of herself, pulls him in by his hair and leaps.

Kisses him.

It feels like the truest thing she’s done in a long time.

He sighs her name.

The he kisses her back.

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	6. March

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March

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 [ **Stream this podfic chapter on your mobile device here**](http://reena.parakaproductions.com/podfics/create%20:%20detonate/06%20create%20_%20detonate%20-%20March.mp3)

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“Oh, Jesus tapdancing Christ, that is, whoa!” Tasha screams.

Since her new reactor feels like it’s burning a hole through what is left of her chest, she figures she’s entitled. Then, slowly, as the rush fades and the black spots in her vision – from light or pain – disappear, a grin stretches across her face.

“JAR?”

“ _All vitals appear steady and stable. The reactor is working to specifications. May I suggest a blood transfusion to help decrease the toxicity levels in your body?_ ”

She waves him off. “Later. So I’m good?”

A beat. And then, with a hint of relief in his voice. “ _You’re good._ ”

The next moment, Jamie’s there, pressing her into the nearest lab table and kissing her until she’s out of breath.

“Mhm,” he laughs as he finally pulls back. “You taste like coconut.”

+

“ _Ma’am, sir? Miss Rushman has arrived._ ”

“Who?”

“ _Miss Rushman. Miss Potts’ new PA, who has an appointment with you. I believe she needs your signature on a number of important documents._ ”

Right. The second redhead in terrifying heels. Tasha’s been wanting to meet the younger woman. She may have mentioned it to Pepper. And no matter what Pepper says, she does indulge Tasha’s whims. All the damn time.

“On our way,” she announces, grabs Jamie – still weird, but good weird – by the wrist and drags him along. He’s her bodyguard. He has to come to all her boring meetings with her. It’s in his contract. Probably. If he ever signed one. Did he? “Did you ever sign a work contract?”

“Would a signed contract make what we’re doing sexual harassment?”

“Probably. Ask Pep, she’s the expert.”

“Then let’s say I did and leave it at that,” he decides with a grin, tucking hair behind one ear and then twisting her grip on him so he’s the one holding on to her. He uses it to stop her, shift past her and then take the lead, covering her with his own body.

Bodyguard. Right.

They make it to the parlor JARVIS corrals visitors in, halfway through the door and then – backwards.

Tasha barely catches a glimpse of the back of a fiery red head and then the door’s closed again and she’s being pulled in the opposite direction. A safe distance away and out of sight, Winter stops, eyes narrowed and shoulders tight.

“I know her,” he says, voice tight.

+

Bony elbows and not blue eyes, Big Brother and ballet shoes, hair like fire and dead eyes, the one that always, always got back up, no matter how hard he beat her. The one who bit and scratched and gouged and never, ever gave up. The prodigy. The best monster a little girl could ever become.

“She was a Red Room Operative.”

“Are you sure? You haven’t been to Red Room in at least fifteen years, right? She’d have been a kid.” Tasha takes a beat, then speaks to thin air. “JARVIS, please run checks on Miss Rushman again. This time, don’t be nice.”

He is sure. He remembers that color of hair, remembers that pose, the glimpse of her face he caught as she spun to face the opening door, body held at the ready. He recognized the way she moves and he knows, knows, knows, to the depth of his bones, that she was once a little Russian doll of a girl who called him Big Brother despite all the times he beat her black and blue.

Tasha must read it in his face, because she nods, even before JARVIS pipes up. “ _Apologies. The background for Miss Rushman was exceptionally well crafted. As a matter of fact, I feel comfortable saying it was crafted especially to hold up to my scrutiny. A facial recognition scan in various law-enforcement databases however yielded results. Highly classified ones. You have in the parlor one Natalia Alianovna Romanova, former Russian operative working under the name of Black Widow. She goes by Natasha Romanov these days and, according to Interpol, works for SHIELD._ ”

Tasha straightens, coiling, ready to strike. “SHIELD?”

JARVIS confirms. “They sent a SHIELD agent after _Pepper_? Oh, it is on.”

She spins on her heels to march back into the parlor, where she will undoubtedly _trounce_ the agent verbally and then kick her out. He stops her with a hand on her arm and when that doesn’t work, an arm around her chest, half lifting her off her feet to get her to stop.

“Wait,” he says and after a few seconds, she does. Trust. Still so strange. So undeserved.

“What?” she snaps and he has no doubt that she is willing to murder right now, right here. Because SHIELD is HYDRA and HYDRA just went for one of the few people in this world Natasha Stark honestly loves.

“She might be HYDRA.”

“I know. Which is why I am going to have JARVIS nuke her ass.”

“She might also not be.”

“Not a problem. Her ass’ll still blow up.”

“Consider it,” he hisses, still holding her still. “She was Red Room. She has as much reason to hate HYDRA as I do. If she’s with SHIELD for real, she’ll hate them for being HYDRA.”

He can tell the exact second she follows his train of thought through to the end, because she stills completely. “You are fucking brilliant, don’t ever let me tell you I only love you for your body,” she announces.

Love. She said love.

He shoves the thought aside for later dissection and finally releases her, watches her tuck away her anger within moments as she faces him. “So how do we test your hypothesis?”

The same way he tested the scientists at the Iceberg. By confusing their loyalties and saying all the wrong things.

He smiles, lets the Winter Soldier bleed through.

Attacks.

+

Tasha enters the room first, the Winter Soldier – not James – a step behind her and to the left.

“Miss Rushman,” she chirps, happy, happy. “So nice to finally meet you. Pepper says good things about you and your shoe collection.”

She waves. Tasha Stark doesn’t like people touching her, so that’s okay. As she sits, motioning for the younger woman to take a seat as well, she nods toward her shadow. “Don’t mind my bodyguard. He’s very discrete.”

He looms, head lowered, hands behind his back. Parade rest. He keeps his expression blank and watches little Natalia recognize his face.

She is good, so very good; her only reaction is a minute twitch, a widening of her eyes. He feels sickened and proud at the same time. He broke her so prettily.

Tasha was broken by other hands, but she plays their game almost as well as they do. “Oh, you recognize him. Gorgeous, isn’t he?” she asks, conversationally. “I got him off of one of Obie’s HYDRA contacts after he died. The constant wiping is a pain, but good help is hard to find, right?”

She sounds completely at ease as she says it. Superior. Like someone who’d keep humans as pets and not care who knew.

Miss Rushman keeps up the act, a shocked PA, an innocent girl. “Are you kidding me? What is going on?”

“What’s going on? Well, Agent Romanov, I got kidnapped, tortured and mutilated in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan and guess what, I didn’t like it. So I took measures to make sure it never happens again and if keeping the Winter Soldier on a short leash is how that goes, well.” Her eyes are cold, her voice is flat and this, this is the person who designed the deadliest weapons this world has seen since the atomic bomb. And the only reason she didn’t invent that was because her father got there before her.

It’s beautiful, the way she shapes her pain into a weapon. The way she uses it to pierce Natalia’s armor. A blade bespoke for the victim. With another woman, he thinks, she might have mentioned the rapes that still wake her fighting. But not with the Black Widow. Not with someone the Winter Soldier trained.

And Natalia shifts and flows upwards, filling Miss Rushman’s body and eyes until there is an assassin sitting on the sofa, staring at Tasha with dispassionate eyes. She’s given up the ruse that didn’t work anyway in favor of gaining more pertinent information.

“That’s bullshit.”

Tasha snaps her fingers at him. “State your mission,” she orders, in Russian.

“Protect Primary: Natasha Maria Stark.” He answers in the same language. It’s easy, slipping back into that skin, that mindset. And it’s true. It helps that what he’s saying is true.

Rolling her eyes, Tasha dismisses the whole thread of conversation. “Anyway. I have no idea what the fuck HYDRA’s playing at now, but I need you to stay the fuck away from Pepper Potts. You come at me, you _come at me_ , not my people, understood.”

“What makes you think I’m HYDRA? HYDRA is dead.”

A snort. “Oh, baby. That’s cute. Babe, who do you belong to?”

“HYDRA.” That’s not true. He belongs to Tasha. Sometimes, on his good days, he considers the idea of belonging to himself. But not HYDRA. Never again HYDRA.

“You’re Red Room, correct?” Tasha asks. She’s talking fast, not giving Natalia time to catch her breath. A cheap tactic, something the Black Widow will not fall for. She’s not shaken up enough, he can tell. Already shaking off the brief shock of his presence.

Still, Tasha keeps up the ruse. “You really think HYDRA wasn’t all over that? That the KGB really managed something like that alone? Come on. I was told you were smart. I was told you were – “

They’re losing her. He sees it, Tasha sees it a moment later, trails off mid-sentence. “Aw,” she drawls. “Fuck it. Jamie, take her down.”

Because he almost, almost guessed what was coming, he’s a split second faster than Black Widow, launches himself on top of her, going straight for the jugular. She grabs the nearest object, a vase on a nearby table, slams it into the side of his skull. The shock of pain gives her the second she needs to knee him in the guts and twist backwards over the sofa, landing in a crouch behind it, ready to fight.

Once, all the tricks she knew were the ones he taught her.

But it’s been a long time since then.

Her style is still the same though, fast and deadly, emphasis on her legs, the most powerful part of her body. She kicks at the sofa, sends it lurching with him still on it, trying to unbalance him. He grabs blindly for the shards of the vase, all around him, throws a fistful at her.

As she is forced to evade, he leaps, lands a solid punch to her face, a second to her shoulder as she spins away. He ducks a kick and she drops to the floor. Wraps a convenient lamp cord around his ankle and yanks hard.

He goes gown, rabbit punches her in the kidneys as he goes.

When he tries to sit up, she uses her legs like a fan, mowing him down again. He catches her thigh, shoves, then twists. She buries her stiletto in his own thigh, hands going for his hair.

He snarls, slams her bodily into the floor. As the breath is punched out of her, she loosens her hold enough for him to punch her again. Metal hand, this time. She spits blood in his face and kicks free, rolls, crouches.

Attacks again, a ferocious fury of kicks and punches. He goes for her hair, pulls her away from himself hard, topples her.

She lands another kick to his knee and he goes down again, gets elbowed in the face as he tries to pin her.

He backs off for a second, vaguely aware that Tasha had JARVIS lock down the room. There is no escape.

Widow realizes it, too, and goes for the obvious weakness left.

Tasha.

Tasha who throws a priceless statue at the redhead to distract her long enough for him to tackle her down and pin her for real, this time, his metal palm cinching tight around her throat.

She hisses, bucks like a wild animal, then stills.

It forces him to compensate, if only for a split second, and she rears again, elbows and knees flying as she switches their positions, backs off.

Standstill.

She’s bleeding from her hairline, her pencil skirt is ripped, her shirt torn open, buttons gone. His own shirt is missing a sleeve, his jaw stings, his knee throbs dully. He tastes blood.

Around them, half the parlor is destroyed. Tasha stands by the door, armed with a lamp, waiting. Patient. For once in her life she’s patient.

Then the girl Natalia once was spits at his feet. “I do not belong to them!”

Tasha rolls her eyes. He isn’t looking, but he can feel it. “Well,” she sighs, “finally.”

And then, “Hey, catch!”

Of course, the other woman doesn’t fall for the obvious ploy, simply adjusts to let the lamp sail past her and shatter the mirror above the mantle into a rain of diamonds, but all he needs is a second.

This time, he doesn’t go for the throat. Instead he curls his metal fingers into a fist and, with most of the mechanical power Tasha has bestowed upon him, punches Natalia out like a light.

Silence.

The broken glass crunches under Tasha’s feet as she approaches. “Was that as close as it looked?” she asks, looking like she wants to nudge the prone woman in the ribs _really badly_.

He’s still catching his breath, so he nods. Red Room produced the best weapons possible, without the Serum. If Tasha hadn’t been there to provide convenient distractions, he doesn’t think he could be sure of the outcome.

He might have won. But he also might have not.

“What now?” he asks, hauling the fake PA off the floor and using the cord she tripped him with earlier to tie her hands and then her ankles, effectively immobilizing her.

It’ll take her maybe a minute to get free once she wakes. She needs to be secured a lot better by then.

“Now?” Tasha asks, manually lifting the lockdown and leading the way downstairs, to the basement. “Now we hit her with the one thing she doesn’t know how to defend against.”

He doesn’t asks, just raises an eyebrow.

“Truth,” she answers, opening doors for him. “We hit her with the truth.”

+

Natalia-Natasha-Natalie wakes tied securely to a chair. Tests her chains without opening her eyes or changing her breathing at all.

Never mind that the Soldier will already know she is awake.

The Soldier. She still reels from the shock of seeing him, alive. Awake.

The last time she saw him, he was freshly wiped, a blank slate of violence and metal, going into the ice. She was fourteen. A lifetime ago.

“Big Brother is gone,” the other girls whispered. “Big Brother is gone.” Half relieved, half terrified. He hurt them, beat them, broke them, but he was known. He was following orders. Even when he shattered bone, they always knew he was simply following orders, deriving no pleasure from their pain, unlike their other teachers.

He was kind, sometimes. With a flicker of something like life in his blue eyes, he stopped a beating to show them a certain move. Avoided hitting an obvious injury. Sometimes, when he was allowed to have a meal with them, he nudged his desert toward one of them. As kind as any monster can be, without knowing it is a monster.

Then he went away, into the ice, and Natalia took his lessons and made herself a fury, a rock, a shadow. Sometimes she hopes she made him proud. Most days she does not think of him at all.

And now here he is, in the hands of Natasha Stark. A weapon, as he has ever been.

But, but, but. As she feigns unconsciousness, waiting for him to call her out, she hears voices. Stark’s surprisingly pleasant timbre, asking, “Christ, how long is this gonna take? How hard did you punch her, slugger?”

The voice that answers is not the flat monotone she remembers, from her childhood, from the parlor. He speaks English and there is something in his tone – he is smiling. “Why, you in a hurry to get somewhere? And you threw a lamp at her, don’t blame me.”

“I missed,” Stark replies, drily. Playfully.

“It was pitiful.”

“I could practice. On you. With this wrench.” Something scrapes against a table top. Presumably, said wrench.

“You could. Or we could get on with it. She’s been awake for two minutes.”

A fake gasp. “Sneaky!”

A moment later, the other woman stands in front of Natalia, barely out of biting range. “Hi there, again. Sorry about siccing Jamie on you, but it’s not like I could take you outside the suit and I need you to pay attention to what’s next.”

Natalia hopes there’s still blood on her teeth when she bares them in a feral snarl, clocking her surrounding as she does. She’s in a workshop. Brightly lit. Clean. A glass door to one side, no windows. Ventilation shaft, seven feet off the ground, screwed down tight. “And what’s that?”

Instantly, suddenly, Stark’s whole demeanor softens. A trap, no doubt. “You know, I don’t like slavery. At all. Ask your buddy over there. It really, really gets my hackles up. So I’m not gonna force you to … okay, no. I am going to force you to listen to me, just now. But after that, I won’t force you. Ever. Okay?”

Disbelieving, Natalia lets her gaze fall on Big – on the Winter Soldier. Surely, Stark is feeding her a crock of shit. But he meets her eyes evenly and then does something she has never thought she’d see him do. He smiles. There are no teeth in it.

Kind, she thinks. Sometimes he was kind.

“What are you going to do with me?”

This time, there is pity in Stark’s gaze as she steps away, reveals the workshop she was bodily hiding from Natalia until now. “I’m going to give you what no-one’s ever given you before. I’m going to give you the truth.”

She backs off further, claps her hands once. Immediately the lights lower and a projector springs to life against the wall across from Natalia’s seat. Stark makes her way to the Soldier’s side, leaning into him. He slings a companionable arm over her shoulders and she wonders if the genius reprogrammed him, somehow.

The projector shows a myriad of photographs, headshots, all, black and white or sepia.

“These are known HYDRA agents and scientists. Most of them confirmed by the Winter Soldier himself. Some of them should be familiar to you?”

They are. Faces she has seen in old files, some of them younger versions of men she knew. Some of them she killed. Still, she doesn’t agree. Stark takes her silence as confirmation anyway.

She claps again and many of the pictures drop away, leaving less than half. “These gentlemen are scientists from HYDRA’s stables who were brought under the aegis of the SSR, now SHIELD, in the process of Operation Paperclip.”

Another image. A research facility, circa 1960. “Of those forty-nine men, _all_ ended up stationed together in this place. Under minimum security. You see where this is going?”

Basic prisoner containment: don’t let them congregate. Natalia cringes at the bad organization. Inwardly.

“Many of them went on to other facilities, took apprentices. Others have children and grandchildren in the agency. Get it yet?”

It sounds plausible.  
“This proves nothing.”

“No. It doesn’t. This,” – more pictures – “is Michael Schüler. He was the son of one of the men that programmed the Winter Soldier. He died, unfortunately, but his basement was very nicely stocked with all kinds of incriminating data.”

This is Iron Man confessing to murdering a SHIELD agent.

“Which led us to the Iceberg, run by a man who was so very HYDRA, you could see it in his face. Which yielded this.”

Two lists pop us, side by side. Both of them bear the SHIELD logo in one corner. Money transfers. Weapons’ logs. The second set is almost identical, but longer. There is more money being moved, more weapons.  
“So someone inside SHIELD is dirty. It happens.”

HYDRA is dead and has been for decades. And even if it’s not, SHIELD is too big, too diverse to be infiltrated to such a degree as Stark is suggesting.

“Guess where all that stuff went, though? Or at least parts of it?” Stark doesn’t wait for an answer, throws up another image. Natalia knows the bunker on the wall as well as she knows her own apartment. Once, it was her home.

She bites her tongue, says nothing. It’s all a lie. Stark has the Soldier. That alone is enough to get insights on Natalia. To know where to hit and where to hurt. It’s a con. Stark ends the little presentation with another clap, untangles herself from the Soldier.

“Believe me. Don’t believe me. But here’s the truth: for some reason, you defected from Red Room to SHIELD. Now, I’m not going to assume I know why. Maybe the health benefits are better in America. Or maybe you got tired of being a nameless, faceless weapon. Maybe you wanted to make a choice, just once, that was your own. Maybe.”

Natalia imagines the woman bending a bit closer, imagines latching teeth onto her throat and ripping it out, killing her in a spray of blood. But she just keeps talking. “Whatever your reason, I’m pretty sure of one thing: there’s no love lost between the people who made – who _forged_ you - and yourself. And whether you call them HYDRA, KGB or Red Room, one thing is certain: They are inside of SHIELD. I could have gone to Fury with this. Maybe I would have, if he weren’t such a raging dick. I didn’t. Me and my one-armed friend over here, we’re taking care of this. Alone. Because fuck knows, you can’t trust anyone in this fucked up spy-world. He wants revenge and me, well. I just like to blow shit up.”

It’s a lie, and a bad one.

“I’m going to untie you now. And then Jamie’s going to show you out. Run back to SHIELD, run back to HYDRA, or just run. I don’t care. You know. Now decide if you’re too broken to do anything about it.”

She knew before this, intellectually, that the Stark heir is a great speaker. Charismatic and enchanting. She didn’t think she’d ever see the power of that charisma, that ruthless intelligence, turned on her.

She didn’t think they’d actually let her go.

But Stark cuts her ties and the Soldier takes her arm, leads her out of the lab, upstairs. She doesn’t try to break free, content, for the moment, to take in her surroundings. To plan.

They have actually reached the entrance hall, when he suddenly speaks. “I’m sorry,” he says, and Natalia almost stumbles in surprise.

“What?”

He smirks, a little half-thing. It looks real. “I’m sorry. For what I did… for what I was. I…,” he rubs a hand over his face, so strange without the muzzle. “Tasha gave me back… me. Who I was. My memories. I… some days I wish to hell she hadn’t, but she did. And I remember. You. The others.” A quirk of his lips. “Bony elbows, all of you.”

“Tasha says none of what I did is my fault, because I was the gun, not the trigger finger. I…I’m sorry. For my hand in making you what you are.”

Then he unlocks the front door, opens it for her and leaves her there, inside his home. Leaves her alone, unchained, free.

Leaves her.

She goes.

+

“Think we got through to her?”

He shrugs, curls into her, his face pressed into her belly, his legs curled around hers. They sleep weirdly. Who cares?

It’s easy to turn people who believe. In anything. Rob them of that belief, point them at something, and they will rage at it like dying suns, for what was taken from them.

HYDRA leaves nothing to believe in. He has no doubt that Natalia’s reason for defecting to America was pragmatic. Perhaps as simple as survival. Cold, ruthless logic. It makes her hard to predict, because even if every word they said was true and she believed it all, she might still decide that she’s comfortable where she is.

If Red Room made her into a weapon as perfect as she seems, she might not care at all who wields her.

If that’s true, they might have just lost everything.

But he remembers, vaguely, flashes of fire in her. Of will. He does not think she is a perfect weapon. He thinks, somewhere, deep down, in that numbed, deadened place he knows so well, Natalia believes.

“We’ll see,” he tells Tasha, cinches his arm tighter around her waist.

“Do you think she’ll rat on us?”

“It’s her job,” he reminds her. What secrets can she tell? That the Winter Soldier is awake? Sooner or later, the world is going to catch on to that fact. Tasha and JARVIS’ fabricated family connection through his long dead sister might be sort of convincing, but evidence keeps piling up. One day, someone will get away. A camera will be hidden too well for JARVIS to find. They’ll glimpse his arm. James Winter was always a play for time.

That Natasha Stark is Iron Man is something SHIELD has long since known. JARVIS keeps the two personas separate for the public, but the enemy is aware.

The only other secret Natalia could tell is who they are hunting. And if HYDRA has not yet caught on to who they are picking off, then they deserve anything that comes at them.

Not that they don’t do anyway.

Letting Natalia know the truth was a risk, but a calculated one.

They stand to gain a lot more than they could lose. One of the benefits of playing all in, he guesses.

When Tasha stays quiet, fingers absently carding through his hair, no doubt running numbers in her own head, he adds, “It was a good play. You manipulated her by not manipulating her. If nothing else, she’ll appreciate the brilliance of it. It might make her hesitate to go up against us.”

She shakes her head against the pillows. “It wasn’t about that.”

When he turns to give her an incredulous look, she corrects, “Not all about that. I think in layers, okay. And that was not the first layer. Call me a sap, but… she doesn’t even know how she’s being used. Back in that cave, in… I knew. I knew exactly what I was for. What they used me for. You know, too. How they used you, what they used you for.”

She hesitates. “They didn’t wipe her clean, but she’s just as unaware as you were, in a way. She thinks she’s free, with SHIELD, in this new life. She thinks she controls her own moves, or at least who does the moving for her.”

“You’re not usually that sentimental,” he observes. She shrugs, tugs on his hair.

“Nah. I just hide it better, usually. Why else would I have thawed you out, Icicle? I… slavery, okay? It makes me want to blow shit up.”

He presses a kiss to her ribs, nods.

“So we trust that we don’t trust her and wait for the fallout, right?”

“Right.”

Another nod. “Night, Jamie.”

Rolling his eyes, he returns, “Night, Nattie.”

“Eurgh!”

+

Natalia steals and lies her way into new clothes, boards the Stark jet that takes her back to Pepper Potts. She goes straight to Natalie’s apartment from the airport. The assignment is radio silent unless she call for aid.

She doesn’t.

Instead she slips off her pumps, pours herself a shot of vodka and downs it. Then she strips off Natalie’s clothes and sit, cross-legged in the center of the too soft bed, pulls a gun out from under one of the pillows and places it in her lap.

She needs to think.

Evaluate everything she knows. Decide.

She works for SHIELD, because SHIELD, wearing Clint Barton’s face, offered her a chance to pull her own trigger. Choice. The option to say no to a mission without being tortured into compliance. The job is still dirty, is still bloody, is still a horror she lives with, but the choice to do it is _hers_.

That is true.

If HYDRA is Red Room, if HYDRA is SHIELD, if she only ever switched countries, not masters, does that change?

Does it matter?

She has said no before and Fury has let her proceed. Not happily, but he did not send her into the black room, did not make her scream for refusing. Choice. He let her have it. SHIELD has let her have it.

But if SHIELD is HYDRA and HYDRA is Red Room, then that choice might have only ever been an illusion. Another tool to make her willing. Another torture, one where the tortured in grateful for what is inflicted upon her.

Natalia hates Red Room. It is an abstract hate, a cold one. They broke her. They took her from her family, took her from her future, from her choices, from her freedom. They locked her in a cell and they spent over a decade systematically breaking her down and building her back up. Spent half a decade after that using her for the purpose they intended.

She does not feel the need to seek vengeance, to burn to the ground the place that spat her out. It’s not efficient and it would get her killed. The Black Widow knows better than to start a suicide mission for something as childish as retribution.

Her revenge is a quieter kind. She uses what they made her against their agenda. She helps SHIELD create a world they will hate.

But if HYDRA is SHIELD and HYDRA is also Red Room, then what the hands of SHIELD build comes from the heads of HYDRA.

If SHIELD is HYDRA and HYDRA is Red Room, then she never got away.

She needs more information.

It’s late, but not too late to go into the local SHIELD branch and look for answers. She could use her own computer and remote access, but she’s not fond of drawing bull’s eyes on herself. So she dresses in something Natalie enough to get her out of the apartment without drawing attention, but still her enough to not be a hindrance in a fight.

Natalie has no car, so she takes a taxi, smiles at the guard on duty and heads for the offices on the first floor before taking a sharp turn into a stairwell and disappearing into the basement, where the archive and server rooms are.

Once there, she hesitates for a moment, not sure where to begin. But Stark gave her everything she needs. Names. Faces.

She goes into the archives to find the hardcopies of the oldest files. No need to make it easy for anyone trying to follow her thought processes. Besides, the SHIELD mainframe has been glitching like mad lately. She suspects she now knows why. The archivist is gone for the evening, but she knows the access codes from her last visit down here. He’s a paper pusher, not an operative. He doesn’t know how to evade someone like her.

Most of the HYDRA files are stored in other facilities, but she finds a few things. Enough to confirm that the faces she was shown were, indeed, enemy operatives during WWII.

Operation Paperclip and old postings are a matter of minutes to check. Also true.

This is where it gets complicated. How does she find anything that marks them as HYDRA when HYDRA has been dead seventy years?

She decides to trace what she has. Personnel requests. Assignments. Postings. Before she knows it, it’s midnight and she’s found a definite trend of second generation former HYDRA people sticking together. Postings in Europe are common. The Iceberg was staffed entirely with people handpicked by an agent with a few very, very sketchy reports in his file. A tendency for his missions to run overtime, for him to disappear into enemy territory and come back out unscathed. A hell of a soldier. Or a hell of a traitor.

It’s nothing concrete, nothing she could use. Just little details that keep adding up, painting a picture that… but she’s compromised, isn’t she? By what she has been told by Stark, by the Soldier.

She’s seeing everything through the goggles they put on her.

Still, whatever is going on, there _is_ something going on.

And yet, this is a spy agency. Of course there is something going on.

In the end, she puts everything back where she found it, takes care not to erase her tracks too well, because absence sometimes draws more attention than presence, and then makes her way back to Natalie’s apartment in time to change for work and get to SI.

On her desk, she finds the stack of paperwork she left at Stark’s mansion in New York the day before, clearly FedExed overnight. Everything is signed. There’s a sticky note attached to the topmost sheet.

It has a smiley on it.

+

“You got something?” he asks, slinging his arm around her shoulders from behind, his fingers clanking against her reactor in a rough, jarring sound. They both wince, but he doesn’t move, staring at the screen over her head. She breathes slowly, once, in and out, forces herself to relax.

Tasha puts the finishing strokes on the program she worked on with JARVIS for the past few days, hits enter. “I hope so,” she grumbles.

HYDRA has good encryption. Apart from Schüler, who seems to have been a bit of an anachronism, HYDRA has damn good encryption. Tasha doesn’t like it.

“JARV? We getting somewhere with this?”

Instead of answering, the AI flashes the screen green a few times and she nods, leans back in her chair. Okay then. “Soon as the drives are decrypted, we should have a new starting point. This is kind of like a treasure hunt. Find a place, find a hint, find the next place. Only instead of ‘place’ I mean ‘evil assholes’ and instead of ‘find’ I mean ‘kill’. And it’s not really hints so much as encrypted data and I’m not really sure – “

James kisses her. No warning, no hesitation, he just turns her head closer with one hand and kisses her silent. Which is mean and neat. He tastes of coffee and cigarettes, unhealthy habits and brilliant ideas, and she sighs into it, trails a hand up his metal arm until she finds flesh and holds on even as his own hands start roaming her torso as he walks her backwards into the desk, pushing down, hands moving down her sides, up towards her chest and –

\- “Don’t!” she snaps, jerking back enough to send her wheelie chair smacking into his legs. “Bad touch, bad touch, bad touch!”

He lets her go, backs off two steps. Waits. It’s stupid and Tasha knows it. He’s touched the reactor before, even in bed, has traced the scars around it. But something about this time, something right here, something… today is a bad day. The ghost of Obie looming over her woke her up and it’s been downhill ever since.

She checks her exits, checks for the suit, breathes until she doesn’t taste cave water and stale air anymore. Stops clutching at the reactor and blinks away Obie’s face, Raza’s face, the faces of a dozen nameless men buried in rubble and desert sands. Fights everything else down by concentrating on the cool, filtered air on her skin, the bright, artificial lights, the smooth floor under her bare feet, as unlike a cave as possible. They are dead. They are all dead and she made them that way. They are dead and this is only Jamie, _her_ Jamie, who does what she says and never forces her.

When she gets a grip, her assassin is still where she left him, patiently waiting. It’s not the first time he’s seen it happen, has had it happen to himself. Damage is like an earthquake. Terrible the first time around, but the aftershocks are sometimes worse.

She breathes. She’ll survive.

They don’t talk about it. Not about the heat she remembers, fire and sunlight, not about the burns where the suit got too hot on bare skin. Not the fear of taking baths or the terror of small spaces. Not the panic at cold days, the fear of surgical equipment, the horror that comes with snow, with drugs, with black and white photographs of dead people.

They don’t need to.

Pepper muttered something about PTSD once, and Tasha didn’t speak to her for days, because sure, yes, but what does it change? What does it get her, except pity? She still needs to live with it, still needs to deal with it. It doesn’t matter what label some shrink slaps on it. It’s still the same carnage in her head, the same damn triggers, the same insomniac madness in her eyes.

It’s still all she has.

“Hi,” he says, after an eternity of simply waiting. Waiting her out. Waiting for the shadows to pass. He smiles, waves a little. She smiles back, goofily and not caring, feels her heart settle a little more, her shoulders untense a fraction.

He takes half a step closer. Asking, wordlessly, for permission.

When she nods, he takes her hand loosely and leads her to the ratty sofa in the far corner. Lies down on it, on his back, all his vulnerable bits exposed. Tasha didn’t register such things, until she spent three months pressed against walls, curled into a ball, clutching her belly for protection even as she slept. He motions her closer, pulls her on top of him and lets her rest there. Her weight on him, her face at his neck, her legs hindering his. Makes himself defenseless against her.

Makes himself still. For her.

He sighs once she settles, eyes closing. Giving her the control she needs right now. The control he sometimes doesn’t want. They have complimentary damage. It’s hilarious. Or it would be, if it weren’t so fucking sad.

He’s completely lax under her, eyes closed and she knows she could kill him, like this. If she had to. If she clawed and bit and scratched, if she called her suit to her, if she had JARVIS help, or Dummy, or any of the other thousand things in the lab. She could. Because she’s powerful.

After a moment’s hesitation, she buries her hands in his hair and keeps them there until they stop shaking.

“I don’t regret finding you,” she whispers into the stillness, later. It’s something she thought about. How differently things might have gone without him. How much easier, without his trauma on top of hers, without his vendetta to mess up her plans for dying alone and in peace. She thought about it and she’s come to the conclusion that she’s never been big on regret and she won’t start now.

His eyes move beneath his lids, the way they did when he was still in the ice, dreaming. His left arm rises, slowly, hovers above the small of her back. A question. She nods into his shoulder and he wraps the arm around her. Holds her closer.

“I don’t either,” he answers and Tasha can hear him smile.

+

If you’ve been fighting for your life for as long as Natalia has, you don’t really develop a sixth sense to warn you of danger. It’s just that the other five bleed together until the tiniest out-of-place things meld into a general sense of alarm.

A face glimpsed too often throughout the day. A set of footfalls just a little too irregular to be strolling along. A glint of something bright, up high. The smell of gun oil lingering on someone passing you by on the street.

Tiny things. Sight, scent, hearing.

Natalia can’t tell what tipped her off. All she knows it that it cumulates in a tingling feeling down her spine, one that usually means someone is aiming a weapon at her, or planning to.

Danger tastes like copper on her tongue as she finishes up for the day at SI and grabs her gym back from her desk, changes in the ladies’. Natalie Rushman is feeling like running home tonight. It’s only five miles, after all. She likes to keep fit, despite the desk job.

She leaves her work clothes and any ID she carries, no matter how fake. Takes only a switchblade, a phone, her keys and a spiderbite up each sleeve.

Running is easy, a rhythm that syncs up to her heartbeat, her breathing. Smooth. Effortless. She takes a shortcut. It’s really not very smart, all sorts of bad things could happen in an unlit street, but she likes how it’s quieter there. Doesn’t like the cars honking at her as they pass by.

It also has the added bonus of rendering any sniper they might have useless. Snipers are dangerous, but relatively bound. They set up along a certain route, wait for their target to come to them. If it’s not coming, they’ll have to default to another plan. That means the sniper will be forced to fight with other means. If the agents they sent for her are well trained, it will not matter much. It will only be a small discomfort, a little adjustment.

But those little cracks, the tiny insecurities, those are where the Black Widow lives.

They are what she uses to pry people open and pull out their insides.

She spots the first one crouched behind a dumpster, not making much of a secret out of his presence. He knows by now that she knows he’s coming.

He steps out of the shadows with a gun in hand, aimed at her, steady, steady. She feints left, picks up speed and kicks at his wrist in time to sent the first shot barely past her ear.

It’s silenced. Good. More time for her.

She drops into a crouch, tries to sweep his legs out from under him. He jumps over her, tries to bring his weapon to bear again. She punches his elbow, grabs the gun and manages to eject the clips just as he fires again, taking care of the last bullet.

Only a hunk of metal now. He gets her in the face with it and she stumbles, turns it into a spin, takes the second to check her surroundings. The second one is sighting down his Glock at her from the fire escape above.

With a sudden, running leap, she gets one leg around the first one’s throat, uses her momentum to swing around, squeeze and pull him down with her as gravity reasserts itself. Usually, she would twist to crouch atop him, but this time, she lets herself fall, holding him immobile with her thighs, shooting a spiderbite directly into his neck, paralyzing him.

A second shot - _pop_ , also silenced, good – and the man in her hold twitches once, shouts. Not dead. Wounded. She releases him by kicking him forward and away from her, where he lands on his knees, one hand keeping him from falling face first into a puddle. The other clutches his shoulder.

She molds herself along his back, a risky move, but necessary, takes his head in both hands, twists.

He was good. She was better. His body makes a wet splash as it drops.

A second of grieved shock costs the other one his advantage. Instead of staying above, he leaps at her, angry, blinded. She evades, picks up the empty gun, hurls it at him and then ducks, firing her second ‘bite. It misses him, fizzles out harmlessly against the brick wall behind him. His second shot grazes her on the shoulder and she curses in quiet Russian, even as she uses the dumpster as a springboard, backflips over his head, disarms him. He whirls to face her, too slow. A moment only, but his last.

Barrel to the back of his neck, pull. She doesn’t check to make sure he’s dead, ducks into cover.

Waits.

Leaves the bodies as bait.

A minute later, just long enough for her wound to start stinging, she hears steps. The sniper, guitar case slung over one shoulder, approaching quickly.

He realizes the set up just in time, swing the case around and brains her with it as she stands to take better aim.

She stumbles, drops the weapon, slams into the nearest wall. Manages to kick out to keep him away. He backs off, the impulse to fight physically over, pulls his backup weapon from a hidden holster.

Aims.

“Stop,” she calls, makes her voice wobble just enough. Raises her hands. “Please.”

He hesitates. Forgets, for a second, who she is and why they call her the Black Widow.

It costs him his life.

+

Two hours later, there is no trace of a fight in that alley. Not a bullet casing, not even a splatter of blood. If someone were to draw a deep breath, they might smell bleach over the stench of the garbage in the dumpster.

But no-one does.

Three SHIELD agents go missing on leave. They are never found. Their disappearance is tallied as another Iron Man attack.

A throwaway comment from Miss Rushman makes Pepper Potts decide that, if Tasha is so willing to sign papers for the new PA, Miss Rushman can just keep doing that.

Her flight for New York leaves at noon the next day.

+

It takes Steve a while, but he finagles the pictures he wants out of the screen and onto paper. Printing is harder than it looks, especially when you don’t want to ask for help.

He doesn’t understand the modern obsession of having everything in a neat little box full of wires. Paper is good. You can touch paper.

But he manages, and in the end, he has a whole stack of pictures taken of Natasha Stark in the past few months. He printed them all, couldn’t figure out how to sort them, does it now. The ones with only her in the frame go straight into the trash. The ones that have her mysterious bodyguard in the frame, those he keeps.

James Winter. All he got from the team was a casual reference that he’s apparently a descendant of Becca Barnes, little Becca, with her hair in pigtails, dead for twenty years. She had a lot of kids, apparently. Her grandson is named James.

He figures he could have asked for the full file, for a picture. Both definitely exist. But this feels… Bucky used to laugh at Steve for his gut feelings, but he also always trusted them. Implicitly. It’s what got him killed.

So Steve kept his mouth shut and does his own research, in an internet café an hour away from base. He managed to insinuate that he was looking up private, embarrassing things, left the guys snickering under their breath about how the forties man is in for a rude awakening concerning sex.

Like babies really were brought by the stork in his day. He didn’t roll his eyes only because it helps him.

Helps him check – unsmoked cigarettes and a nest too low to be smart, perfect shots and too much snow. It’s ridiculous, ludicrous, completely impossible, but he’s a man who spent seventy years in ice, and hope is a terrible thing when you’re at the end of your rope, the only familiar faces so old, they break your heart. He needs to check. If he ever wants to close his eyes again and not see – not wonder – he needs to check.

Most of the photos are useless. The bodyguard doesn’t like the spotlight, keeps his hair or a baseball cap over his face. Stays in the background. The tabloids speculate about his relationship with Stark anyway, and they’re not subtle about it.

There is one image of them both in Central Park, walking, him half a step behind, while she leads, carelessly gesturing. James Winter is staring at the camera over Stark’s shoulder, giving the photographer a warning glare.

Steve knows that glare, that squint, the slightest tilt of the head, the set jaw, the flared nostrils. He knows the low sound that goes with it, the headshake, the frustrated anger. He knows that face.

The scar, the tiny, tiny scar to one side of the angry jut of the chin, from a fight when they were both seventeen.

He knows that face.

Family resemblance is one thing but this… this is the one face, the one person in the world Steve knows better than himself. The one person he would know if he were blind, deaf and dumb.

His heart stops, starts, lurches, his lunch rebels, his mouth tastes like bile. His head pounds in time with his heart, going too fast.

He knows that face.

He knows that face.

He knows –

\- the whistle of the train, the rush of air, the pain in his chest, the screaming in his arms, the screech of metal, the desperate shout, the hate, the fear, the split second eternity of watching the fall, the fall, the fall, before the train twisted to take even that away, take away that last glimpse, the wind picking up his scream, ripping it to the heavens and then –

Nothing.

There was nothing.

Bucky was dead and there was an empty grave he never got to see and then -

It takes him a moment to register that the tinny ringing isn’t just in his ears. His phone is ringing. He fumbles it twice, finally answers with a faint, “Yeah?”

Terrible manners.

Bucky is alive.

Bucky is with Stark.

Bucky is with Iron Man.

Bucky is killing in the name of a madwoman with a vendetta.

“Cap,” Brock drawls over the phone. “Field trip’s cut short. We need you back at base. There’s a new development.”

+

There is a strange woman in the conference room when Steve gets there, dressed in what he understands is business chic nowadays, with hair the color of fresh blood.

She smiles thinly and it almost works to disguise her shock when, after a second’s delay, she seems to place his face.

Brock’s smile is a bit less pleasant and he takes his time getting up and introducing them, looking amused. “Romanov, meet Captain America. Cap, meet Agent Romanov, also known as the Black Widow. She was working the Stark angle and has recently made some progress.”

With that said, he sits back down. Steve sinks into the empty seat next to him, his gave fixed on Agent Romanov. She doesn’t look like much, besides beautiful, but he knows better than to judge a dame by her looks and her clothes.

Agent Sitwell, who STRIKE has been working with recently, clears his throat. “Agent Romanov has been working from the other end of the Stark/Iron Man problem for the past month, undercover at Stark Industries. She finally got a face to face with Stark last week. And was immediately made.”

Steve’s eyebrows hit his hairline. “How?”

“James Winter,” Romanov cuts in before Sitwell can drone on. Steve’s heart stops. “I don’t know if that’s his real name, but when I knew him, we called him the Winter Soldier.”

Sitwell helpfully pipes up, “The Winter Soldier is a ghost in spy and special ops circles. In the past sixty years or so, over four hundred kills were attributed to him. He comes, he kills, he goes. He always wears a mask and probably originated in Russia, though we can’t be sure. He’s been inactive for the past decade. We thought he was dead. All we knew about him until yesterday was that he has a prosthetic left arm and that he has never missed his mark. We don’t even know if it’s an inherited title.”

Oh god, Bucky, what have they done to you? What have they –

“It’s not,” Romanov takes back the word. “He looks twenty-five today and he looked twenty-five the last time I met him as a teenager. He was one of my teachers in Red Room, the organization that trained me.” She adds the last for Steve’s benefit.

“Your teacher?” He asks. He sounds too hopeful and he knows it, but this is Bucky, he only just learned that this is _Bucky_ and now they’re talking of missing limbs and nightmares, of a killing machine, a monster that doesn’t die, some kind of walking horror and he can’t – Bucky. God, Bucky.

Her smile goes thin again. “If you call beating someone into a pulp on a daily basis until they figure out how to finally fight back ‘teaching’, then yes, the Winter Soldier was my teacher. A good one, too.” She shakes her head, something like memory in her cool gaze. Steve wants to curl up and weep.

Oh, oh, Buck.

“He made me the second I came through the door and informed Stark. Apparently, she got her hands on him a while back and has been using him since then.” She sounds perfectly detached.

“He’s a person!” James Buchanan Barnes, of the lopsided smiles and caustic jokes, the dumb loyalty and the beautiful heart.

Her gaze is narrow. “He is a weapon. I should know, I came from the same forge. But what’s more, when I knew the Soldier, he was… a blank slate. Machines, drugs, torture. I don’t know how they did it, but he was a thing, not a person. Empty. They told him to break a bunch of children and he did. Whatever or whoever he once was, he’s just a loaded gun now, Captain. He took me down on Stark’s command and I thought I was dead.”

“How did you escape?”

A short bark of laughter. She leans her elbows on the table, lips pursed. “I didn’t. They let me go. When I woke up, I was tied to a chair, and Stark proceeded to tell me some mad story about how all of SHIELD is really HYDRA and she is going to wipe them all out. I… convinced her that I believed her. She wanted me to so badly that it wasn’t hard. She seems to have suffered some kind of psychotic break in Afghanistan, made up some super enemy behind the scenes, someone responsible for all her pain, and now she’s lashing out. Except Stark ‘lashes out’ with a multi-billion dollar weapons company, her own genius mind, and the most feared assassin in modern history behind her.

“She told me Red Room was HYDRA, too, tried to turn me. I let her believe she has. So as of last night, I am officially helping Natasha Stark fight ‘HYDRA’.”

She leans back, a satisfied expression on her face and something terrible in her eyes. “I’m your inside man.”

“Cap?”

Something must show on his face, some of the revulsion, the horror, the rage he feels. Bucky always said he was shit at poker.

He blinks himself back to reality to find Chance looking at him with something akin to worry in her expression. When he’s too slow to reassure her, the others follow suit, except Romanov, who watches him, serene and remote as a bird of prey.

The same forge.

He didn’t want to tell them. Even an hour ago, he didn’t want to tell his team about what he found out. He didn’t understand the impulse, but he was willing to follow it. But now… how can he not…

“His name,” he says, out loud, before he can convince himself differently, “is James Buchanan Barnes.”

He doesn’t say more than that. Can’t.

It’s enough. Brock is the first to suck in a sharp breath, followed shortly by Sitwell.

“Cap, that’s impossible. I read the reports. He fell. There was no way….”

“Maybe he’s a clone.”

Steve frowns. “What’s a clone?”

Ramirez shrugs, one-shouldered. “A genetic copy of a person’s body.”

“Does a clone have the same scars?” he asks, fighting down the tangle of hope and despair fighting to rise at the possibility of James Winter not being Bucky after all. Maybe he’s at rest. Maybe Steve is alone after all.

But Ramirez shakes his head. “That’s what your secret research was, isn’t it?”

“I needed to be sure.”

“You could have – “

Sitwell interrupts before the team squabble turns into an argument. “So James Winter is James Barnes, AKA Bucky Barnes, AKA the Winter Soldier. That…” he rubs at his receding hairline, “is a bigger fucking mess than I anticipated.”

STRIKE start talking, throwing around ideas, theories. Steve sits in the middle, silent and tries to regain some kind of equilibrium. He’s almost managed it when, by accident, he meets Romanov’s gaze across the table. Her green eyes are narrowed at him, expression thoughtful.

He needs to get out of this room, and soon.

+

He has no idea how he makes to the end of the meeting.

Or down the hall. Or out of the building and toward his quarters. Into the bathroom. To the toilet.

Nor does he know how long he spends there, on his knees, throwing up everything he’s eaten since 1945.

Bucky is alive. Bucky is a brainwashed assassin for the enemy. Bucky is a monster, Bucky is a nightmare, Bucky is someone who tortured children with the intent of teaching them to be just like him. From the look in Natasha Romanov’s eyes, he succeeded.

Bucky belongs to, or follows, or is enslaved by, Howard’s daughter. Howard’s daughter, who is a villain, a monster herself, an enemy to SHIELD and the free world. Howard’s daughter, who was tortured and broken badly enough to see enemies everywhere, who fights ghosts and kills people, too broken to tell the difference, or too angry. Howard’s daughter, who keeps slaves to kill for her.

Red Skull was easy. He was a bad man doing bad things.

But Natasha Stark is broken, a wrecked, wretched thing, if Romanov is to be believed, a wounded animal, lashing out. Murdering indiscriminately. Good men and women. Agents of the shield.

And Bucky is nothing now, a weapon on a hair trigger, wielded by a madwoman. Bucky was a good man, but Romanov looked him dead in the eye and told him Bucky isn’t a man at all anymore.

He told them. He shouldn’t have, but he told them then, who he used to be, Bucky, Bucky, Bucky, a person, a man, a friend. He told them and it felt like a betrayal, like he was taking his past away after everything else had already been taken. Like he was the one consigning Bucky to… to nothingness. To being –

_He’s a weapon._

A weapon in the hands of a Stark. Steve knows how these things end. He has read about the atomic bomb. Has read about Natasha, volatile even on her best days, a vicious, open wound now, after. And she has Bucky. She has her weapon.

He gags again, dry heaves, and doesn’t dare close his eyes, because every time he does, he has visions of having to kill them both and he fears they’re premonitions, instead of nightmares.

Not for the first time, he wishes they’d left him in the ice.

+

The door opens before Natalia gets close enough to ring the bell and she sweeps inside without pausing, keeps walking with snapping heels until she clears the bright doorway into the dark foyer and the heavy oak slams shut behind her.

Then, and only then, does she allow herself to slump. Only for a moment. Only for a single breath.

When she opens her eyes again, they are met by Stark’s – call me Tasha, it’ll be fun - inquisitive dark ones. “So, they buy it?” the older woman asks, artfully moving to steer her past the parlor she was in the last two times, toward another room, facing the back of the house.

It’s open, airy, painted white and soft grey, with windows facing the garden. A garden in New York City. Natalia lets herself be herded to the sofa in the middle, where an afghan lies, obviously used. This is a real room, one that people live in. If she weren’t so exhausted, Natalia would feel gleeful at getting to see this.

As it is, she’s just grateful to not have to fight for a moment. Going to her former employers, convincing them she’s double crossing the Stark heir, cost every bit of skill she has. Staring down the snake and lying well enough to be dismissed as a threat. It worked. For now.

The bodies she got rid of might still show up, someone might doubt her on principle, but for now it worked.

Natalia lets herself drop down on the sofa, ignoring her pencil skirt and tight blouse. “Yes,” she finally answers, facing them both, Iron Man and Winter Soldier.

Stark and Winter.

Tasha and James.

The American with the Russian name and the Russian with the American name, they joked last night, switching languages seamlessly mid-sentence. She doesn’t think they even notice.

The Soldier is hanging in the doorway, waiting for her to tell him the threat level he has to expect. James. She should call him James. He laughs, smiles, jokes. He kisses Tasha. He is not the Soldier anymore.

But Natalia still sees him lurking under there, in the dark moving in his eyes, the glint of his arm, the coil of his muscles. Big Brother, perhaps. A softer killer.

She remembers Steve Rogers’ expression across the expanse of the conference table, the lost, broken look in his eyes. She wonders if this man, the one who calls himself James, is anything like the James Captain America remembers.

“They bought it. I’m alone,” she finally offers, surprised to see both of them relax almost completely. Trusting her. Not even her partners tend to trust her. None except Clint.

Clint, whose wife she sent a postcard, telling her to call him and ask him to come home because she set the kitchen on fire trying to cook borsht. It’s the safest way she knows to extract him without drawing attention.

Tasha grins and flops down on the sofa next to Natalia. “So that makes you, what, a double agent? Triple agent? Or is it quadruple?”

When she sees the others both grimacing, she crows. “Ohhhh, bad spy terminology? Does this offend your spy-sensibilities? Are spies even allowed to have sensibilities? We should watch all the spy movies, you’re going to hate it, it’ll be hilarious. Babe, have you gotten around the _Bourne Identity_ , yet?”

He considers, dropping down on Tasha’s other side, taking care not to fence Natalia in. Leaving her a clear shot at two exit routes. She appreciates it even as she takes off her heels. They were a part of her cover meant to please Pepper Potts, and while she can walk in them, she really doesn’t like to. They make her feel too tall, like she’s standing out. Sometimes, that’s part of the cover. Today, it was additional stress. She’s glad Fury wasn’t at the meeting. She doubts she could have fooled him. Or Coulson. Sitwell, though, is a desk jockey. Sitwell doesn’t know her tells.

“No. What are they about?”

The genius cackles. “JAR, cue them up on the big screen. I’m making popcorn, this is going to be epic. Teetwo, don’t let him run!”

Natalia, who is wondering why she isn’t giving a sit rep at the moment, asks, “Teetwo?” in her best dangerous voice.

“Tasha Two. Teetwo, get it?”

“If anything, I would be Tasha One.”

“Nope, older than you. I’m the first, even if not the only.” Stark grins, waves and disappears out a second door.

James, who was apparently waiting for her to leave, waves off the question he knows is coming. “I find it best not to question her motives. She does what she wants and usually, there is some kind of system to her madness. Right now, she’s trying to put you at ease.”

“Why?”

He shrugs easily. “Because you need it. Tasha isn’t good, exactly, but she’s… kind.” He says it with something terribly devote and vicious in his voice and Natalia snorts delicately.

“I used to think that about you,” she confesses, letting her filters drop, just once. Just for a moment. She just sold herself to the man who broke her and a woman with no training and no chance in hell at winning against SHIELD. Sold herself to them because the other side, the ones that were supposed to give her choice, to give her a purpose to kill for, other than power and greed, tried to kill her. Maybe their name is SHIELD, maybe their name is HYDRA. But they tried to take the one thing she has left, and that is not permitted.

So she’ll kill them first. And these two are her best bet and so here she is, sitting in a living room that has blankets on the sofa and coffee rings on the table, preparing to watch inane movies like… like a normal person. Like a _person_.

They gave her truth, they gave her choice, they gave her freedom and as unlikely as it all seems, she finds herself… wanting. To believe. To stay. They invited her for war, but now they are making popcorn and preparing to watch movies and she wants.

She wants.

James smiles, crookedly, and it still looks so strange on his face. A face, she knows now, that has been the same for over seventy years. Captain America has seen this smile. Captain America. Steve Rogers. It’s going to be a problem.

But right now, James smiles. He gets it. “She does that to you,” he assures her and then doesn’t say anything at all anymore as Tasha comes bounding back into the room, drops herself between them and puts her head into his lap, her feet into Natalia’s. Like this is the kind of thing they do.

“JARVIS, start the movie?” she asks, more polite than usual and the screen flickers to life.

Slowly, Natalia rests her hands on bare ankles, makes herself not think about how easy it would be to break them. Watches the movie.

She can give her sit rep in two hours.

+

“Read it,” Sitwell orders Steve with a clap on the shoulder, hours later. His mouth still tastes sour, his stomach still rebels, but there is nothing left to retch up. He feels hollowed out. “It’s not a lot, but it’s everything Black Widow could give us on the Winter Soldier.” He shakes his head, sighs. “It’s not pretty, Captain, but I think… I think you should read it anyway. You need to… prepare. For what your friend has become.”

He looks incredibly sad.

Steve shakes his hand off. “What he was turned into,” he argues, because whatever else he might know in the world, this is sure: Bucky did not become this voluntarily. He would have died first.

Sitwell shrugs. “Maybe. But whatever brought him here, there’s a Stark wielding him now. And you know firsthand how good they are with weapons. You might not have a choice.”

Lips in a thin line, Steve lets that stand. Flips the folder open, a silent plea to be left alone. The agent hears it.

He reads the short explanations Agent Romanov gave after the meeting, about how and when and why she met the Winter Soldier, what his abilities are, his weaknesses. About the ways they turned him blank and hollowed him out, as far as she knows. A mixture of torture, chemicals and neurological stimulation.

She says she only caught a glimpse of the machines in Stark’s basement, couldn’t more than guess at them. An annotation in the margins comments that the combination is most likely. The most effective way to brainwash someone into absolute submission.

Stark is a genius. It’d be an easy thing for her to optimize the outdated machines, update them.

As he reads on, he feels his pity start to fade. Stark may have been a victim, but there is a line and she crossed it by victimizing others. Victimizing the person Steve loves most in this world.

Some things can’t be forgiven.

+

After the movie – which was as hilarious as Tasha prophesied, thanks a lot – they make the pilgrimage to the kitchen, where there is coffee and booze, both to be applied as needed.

Coffee, mostly, for Tasha. She hasn’t slept a wink since her second Russian assassin joined them yesterday.

She honestly thought she was going to have a heart attack when Natalia showed up in the middle of the afternoon, dressed like Natalie but armed to the teeth, with a set to her jaw that spelled murder in seven different languages.

“They tried to kill me,” was all she said. Followed by a very concise description of how she planned to kill them back and if she and Jamie don’t fuck up completely, she’s willing to work with them to reach that common goal. She looked like she was cut from marble and so _damaged_ that Tasha sighed, rubbed her eyes and decided to adopt a second Russian super spy. This one not instant. Or freeze dried. But just as broken.

DPA.

She’ll need to have more t-shirts made.

How exactly she, Queen of Fucked Up, ended up adopting not one, but two, strays, she has no idea. But here they are. She spent the night shoring up any footage that might compromise Natalia, digging into the LA police system to find out if anyone has found the dead agents and generally trying to make this whole damn mess as safe as she can for the other woman.

Which is not very, since HYDRA obviously knows she went digging and decided to take care of the problem. Even with her story, there’s no guarantee they won’t try again, just because they’re paranoid assholes who do shit like that.

After all that, she had an in depth discussion with her _other_ Russian assassin about the care and feeding of Black Widows, amount of trust that should be extended, precautions that should be taken. After about half an hour, she just shook her head, shrugged and declared, “If I’d treated you like that, you would have run for the hills.”

Followed by, “Screw this. Tashas need to stick together.”

And that was that. Is that. Suddenly, there were three against the windmills.

So she downs her first coffee hot enough to burn her throat, spikes the second with a generous amount of whiskey and says, “Lay it on me,” convinced that it can’t get any weirder.

And then Natalia goes and says, “SHIELD has found Captain America,” and Jamie turns the color of old cheese.

Well, fuck.

+

+


	7. April

+

April

+

 [ **Stream this podfic chapter on your mobile device here**](http://reena.parakaproductions.com/podfics/create%20:%20detonate/07%20create%20_%20detonate%20-%20April.mp3)

+

+

“Moving in,” the Black Widow announces in a whisper and the Winter Soldier marks her progress from the rooftop of the shabby motel through the small, grimy bathroom window. Through his scope, she is barely more than a shadow.

“Roger that,” he returns, wishing her good luck in Russian directly after. He likes to imagine he can hear the curl of her lips.

For long moments he listens to her breath, her steps, the click of a door. Inside room number 109, nothing moves. Nothing except her.

Then, a strangled sound, someone with a severed windpipe fighting for breath that will never come.

A moment later, the same shadow slips out the same window as before and two minutes later, he meets her a block down from the motel, his rifle packed away neatly, her black bodysuit hidden under a loose hoodie with bright neon _DPA_ spelled out on the back, and sweatpants.

Perfectly ordinary, they stroll down the street to where they parked the car, get in and drive away.

+

“You know,” Tasha announces as they step into the living room, “pizza runs usually don’t take four hours.”

Natalia shrugs and James presses a kiss to the crown of her head, dropping dinner into her lap.

“But then,” she adds, opening the first box, inspecting it for olives – which are vile, she’ll tell you – “they don’t usually include murder.” She looks at them both, eyes shrewd and cold. “I assume I can strike Vanko from my watchlist, then?”

Natalia is too good to freeze, but she does go on alert. Tasha is… usually softer. A glint of humor in her eye, a smirk tugging on her lips. Not like this. She waits, quietly, perched on the arm of the sofa, for the scene to play out. For their leader – and Tasha is their leader, no matter how strange it may seem for two seasoned assassins to follow a civilian – to decide how to punish them for their transgression. James, however, just shrugs, pulls the pizza boxes right back out of Tasha’s lap and plants himself in it instead, his knees on either side of her thighs, his forearms resting on her shoulders, entirely unafraid of her reaction. She slings her arms loosely around his waist and looks up at him expectantly.

“He was gunning for you,” he explains simply, using the colloquialism to try and distract her. Sloppy work, a red herring, a simple play of words.

It doesn’t work. She doesn’t think he ever expected it to. Tasha just narrows her eyes at him. “I was watching him. It’s what ‘watchlist’ implies.”

Pressing his forehead against hers, he counters, “He needed to be taken care of.”

She tugs on his hair, pulling him impossibly closer and Natalia watches, waits, tries, for the hundredth time, to figure out how they do it, how they let each other so close. A few weeks ago, she would have thought Tasha stupid, careless, for letting the Winter Soldier climb on top of her, letting him pin her down like this.

She knows better now, knows the balance of them, the distribution of power, even before the other woman answers, “Not alone. Not without me to back you. Not _alone_.”

“We were fine.”

“There were cameras on the ATM across the street, on the block where you parked the car, two on the way from there to the motel. You were filmed seven times on your way to and from the crime scene.”

“They never would have traced us.”

“The police? No. Someone else? Yes.” She pulls on his hair harder, slants a glare at Natalia, including her. “Not alone. Not ever alone. Is that clear?”

Tasha, Natalia thinks, is more terrified of losing people than she is of her own death. She looks ready to call off the whole thing every time Natalia returns to SHIELD alone, to lie and steal information, to be a spy among spies. It humbles Natalia and confuses her.

Now, she waits for James to nod, then Natalia. Then she relaxes, going suddenly lax under him and rolling her hips up while pulling back with the hand in her hair, dislodging him. He slips to his feet effortlessly and sideways, to sit next to her as she directs him. Once he is where she wants him, Tasha turns her gaze on Natalia.

“Come on, Teetwo, it’s snuggle time.”

Natalia rolls her eyes. “It’s always snuggle time with you two.”

“We’re poor,” Tasha counters. “We can’t afford therapy. And really, we’d drive any shrink to commit suicide within a week. And chocolate makes you fat, so give up already.”

She doesn’t join the snuggle pile. But she does slip down from her perch and stick her cold toes under Tasha’s thigh, lets the other woman rest a hand on her ankle and doesn’t think of the ways that hand could hurt.

Doesn’t think of how she killed a man today to keep Tasha safe, or the way Big Brother came to her in the middle of the night and asked her, trusting and easy, if she wanted to help him with Vanko. Assuming she would.

“He wants Tasha. He needs to go,” he said, with a fire in his eyes that was entirely unlike anything Natalia remembers from him.

And she said yes without thinking.

She doesn’t think about any of those things while she sneaks some of her olives onto Tasha’s pizza and then watches her gag at the taste, simply because it makes them all laugh.

+

After dinner, they drowse in front of a movie until Teetwo starts making noises about needing get back to either one of her day jobs sometime soon. It would be smarter for her to quit as Pepper’s PA, but Pep actually likes her and Tasha lives in fear of the day her CEO figures out that Natalie is an actual Russian assassin sent to spy on Tasha. She is going to be yelled at _for hours_.

So, right now, Tasha has co-opted Natalie, SHIELD thinks Natasha is doing her job, and Natalia kills for Tasha and watches a lot of bad eighties movies with her and Jamie. It’s like having multiple personality disorder, only with more guns and lies.

“Yeah, no,” Tasha waves away the concern. “I found something.”

She leads the way down to the lab where JARVIS is already helpfully pulling up what they worked on while the murder duo was out being busy. She’s not sure yet how she feels about that, about them killing. For her. To protect her. They’ve been out together before, Jamie and Teetwo, going places Iron Man would have drawn too much attention, quietly and effectively doing bad things to bad people. According to their inside redhead, SHIELD has only found out about one of those little sidetrips yet. So they’ve been out before and they’re good at it. But it’s always been the fight against HYDRA, so far. Tonight, Vanko, that wasn’t HYDRA. That was two people who have been used and abused before, deciding to aim themselves at one of Tasha’s enemies without her asking for it. It’s weird. Like having two ferociously loyal guard dogs who occasionally go for preventative mauling, and also very terrifying.

Tasha, predictably, likes it. How could she not? They – both of them – are brilliant like bombs and explosions, like fire and the whistle of a bullet in mid-flight. They are weapons she did not forge, but who, for some reason, have decided to let her wield them.

Jamie she understands, Jamie is a tiger duckling who doesn’t know anything but her, but Natalia has options. Has connections. She has people and exit strategies and a hundred bolt holes to disappear into. But somehow she’s still here. Hell, she lets herself be cuddled on occasion, holds still while Tasha tugs on her blood red curls or bumps their hips, or leans into her on the sofa.

She lets Tasha close. She stays and Tasha thinks of dark caves and brilliant fires, of fierce women with the Winter Soldier reflected in their eyes, of all the ways people can be broken. It’s better than thinking of beaten dogs and lonely orphan girls in the snow.

She was telling the truth, earlier. There’s no shrink in the world that could take on their combined issues.

And now, somehow, Natalia is alright with killing in Tasha’s name and that’s… Tasha isn’t even sure she’s alright with killing in Tasha’s name.

She shakes off the thought to have nightmares about later, focuses on her results.

“A ship?” Jamie asks, squinting at the holograms.

“Yep.”

“What’s on it?”

She gives him a sunny grin. “I have absolutely no idea. But it’s got HYDRA’s dirty paws all over it.”

“And would it…”

“Yes.” Make a perfect trap. The ship would make a perfect trap. She palms open another file, spreads it all over the room.

“STRIKE team,” Teetwo provides, looking around. “Are they?”

Since she’s the one who provided the data that got Tasha started on them, she’s already guessed the answer anyway.

“Through about fifteen degrees of separation, a dozen fake identities, ten years of special and black ops and a shit load of encryption? Yes. They absolutely are. And they’ve got Captain goddamn America playing king of their hill.”

“Steve doesn’t know,” Jamie, throws in, sounding absolutely sure.

Steve. Captain America. Tasha is still sore that she didn’t know about him, but someone was smart enough to keep that particular skeleton paper-only. She had to get _creative_ to get any information at all about him, and they still barely know how he got found.

On accident.

After almost seventy years of the Stark Foundation searching, a couple of goons with a drill dug him up. And then SHIELD kept him in some dark corner until they had use for him and even if he’s the raging asshole Tasha always imagined instead of the man Jamie describes, she still wants to murder Fury.

She’s not the only one. It took both of them, Tasha and Natalia, to keep Jamie from tearing a bloody path through SHIELD HQ on his way to get Steve out of there. Took them hours to calm him down and it wasn’t until Tasha swore, swore to him that they would get him out and kill everyone in their way, that he subsided.

“Promise me,” he ordered, Russian or English, she can’t even tell anymore.

She promised. More surprisingly, she meant it.

“So we take the ship and then we take their shiny figure head.”

Natalia, standing on the other side of the table, looks from one to the other, shaking her head. “You’re insane,” she observes.

She sounds like she’s starting to like it. Since she’s still wearing the DPA hoodie they had made for her; yeah. Totally.

Tasha grins.

+

Steve knows hate.

He grew up as a poor, fragile thing in a poor time and a poor neighborhood, everyone needing to take their fear and hunger and desperation out on someone. More often than not, he was the target of that kind of hate, the aimless, vicious kind.

Later, during the war, there were the Nazis and their baseless but focused hate. They didn’t hate someone who was convenient. They hated who they were told to, swallowing the propaganda they were spoon-fed by their leaders.

It was scarier than the hate of the gang kids in Brooklyn, because there was a well-oiled war machine of millions behind it.

But that was other people’s hate. Steve experienced it from the outside. It wasn’t until Red Skull, until Bucky fell, that Steve understood what hate feels like from the inside, that tight, spiked thing in your chest, the hot rage in your veins, the cold desire to _end things_.

He learned. After Bucky, because of Bucky, he learned.

He remembers now. After Bucky, because of Bucky, because of a dozen agents shot dead by a sniper and Romanov’s words stuck on repeat in his head. _He’s a weapon._

And Stark is wielding him to kill the people she has deemed her enemy, to murder good agents. Their blood on Bucky’s hands and Steve remembers hate. It was pity, for a while, a sick, sinking feeling. Howard’s daughter, broken to pieces.

For a while, he thought that maybe he’d be able to save her, too, save them both. But this is the fifth time he’s stood in this morgue in the past months, the fifth time he’s looked down at dead agents, killed by Stark via Bucky’s hand.

The seventh time, all in all, she’s used him to murder innocents.

He pitied her. For a few days after that night spent retching in the bathroom, he pitied her like one pities a dog so damaged and beaten it bites anyone that comes close to it.

But Stark doesn’t bite people close to her. Stark goes out searching for people to kill. Stark doesn’t deserve pity. Not after doing to Bucky what was done to her. Not after a kill count in the triple digits.

And Romanov has barely brought them any useful information. Usually, all she can do is tell them where they’ll find the bodies.

And then Steve rides here with his grim faced team mates and looks down at the bodies and remembers hate.

“I knew Garrett,” Brock announces, nodding toward one of the dead, a man in his fifties with a friendly face, bloated with death. Most of the back of his skull is blown out. “Good man. Good agent.”

Steve nods. “They all were,” he agrees and Brock must hear something in his voice, claps him on the back.

“We’ll get the bitch, Cap. We’ll get her and then we’ll get your friend out. Black Widow’s getting closer all the time. Soon, we’ll get them.”

Steve understands hate. He doesn’t like it.

+

“Is it worth it?” Natalia asks, bare feet soundless on the cold tiles. It’s long past midnight, but James can’t sleep. He left Tasha knocked out in Howard’s shrine room. He hasn’t spent a lot of time there recently because it seems strange to be surrounded by images of the dead when one of them is still alive, when he could be planning to save Steve instead of staring at him.

He thought Tasha spent her time there because of him. She is always very vocal about declaring her hatred for Howard’s things, Howard’s obsession. James thinks at least part of it is that she still counts herself among those things. Howard’s things. Howard’s daughter. He saw an interview of her once, in the early days, a skinny twenty-year-old Tasha in a too short skirt, telling the reporter that at least in her father’s shadow, she doesn’t get sunburnt. There was an echo, somewhere at the back of his skull, when he heard her say that.

He didn’t remember until a few weeks ago why that was. They were his words. She was quoting him. Twenty and lost and glaring white-hot murder at the interviewer, she quoted him and smiled with all her teeth on display.

He still found her in Howard’s room tonight, asleep on the mattress they dragged in there before Natalia came and burst their little bubble of twosomeness. She was curled around her reactor, arms crossed over her chest and didn’t scare awake when he opened the door. He didn’t have the heart to wake her.

“What?” he asks, obliging Natalia by slipping into her native tongue.

“All this. Vengeance. Retribution. You could still slip away. Become a shadow. They would never find you.”

He rolls his shoulders, taking a second to enjoy the balance there. Tasha has succeeded in making his metal arm no heavier than his flesh and bone one. A real boy. Above them, the stars are barely guessed at. New York got even dirtier in his absence, which seems impossible, but isn’t. It’s a trend.

He imagines it. Walking away. From all of it. Tasha and her Iron Man. Steve and all the memories and guilt. HYDRA, SHIELD. He could become anyone, do anything. He could be free.

What the hell does he know about freedom?

“I spent sixty-six years as a shadow,” he tells her, after too long a silence, turning to find her leaning in the balcony door, dressed in sweatpants and a t-shirt, as unarmed as he has ever seen her. “I’m not going back to that.”

Tasha keeps telling him people have no purpose.

Maybe she’s right.

But maybe they can make one.

“Plus,” he adds, “I’m not leaving my best bud in the hands of fucking HYDRA. But if you want to leave, I won’t stop you.”

She’s been here, with them, for almost a month now, but he still isn’t sure he understands her motives. It’s not vengeance, nor is it heroism. She doesn’t feel the need to do the right thing anymore than he does. She claims having a choice is worth defecting. Maybe that’s all there is to it. For her.

She shrugs, pushing off from the doorjamb and padding back into the dark room beyond. “I guess it’s alright here,” she calls back over her shoulder as she leaves.

James laughs, short and honest and follows her inside, catching up with her in the hallway. “Come on,” he tells her. “We’re sleeping in the shrine.”

“Are we?” she demands, eyebrow hitched high.

He nods and simply tows her along. Someone to keep watch, a chance to relax with someone at your back, or simple companionship. Either way, she lets herself be dragged along.

+

It’s weird, how fast everything is moving all of a sudden.

After months of sneaking around in the shadows, of moving unseen and in small steps, this one… this one feels big. And fast.

It’s been a scavenger hunt so far, some little outpost, a lonely HYDRA operative, a bit of information, another puzzle piece. But this time is different. Tasha can feel it, that grating, sinking weight behind her chest piece. The _Lemurian Star_ is something important. They don’t know how yet, or why, but it matters.

And what’ll come after the ship matters even more.

“We good?” she asks, for roughly the fifth time. On her back, fingers hooked into the seams of her shoulders, the Winter Soldier grunts.

“Yes. Still.”

“And Natalia is sure that she can – “

“Yes. Still.”

“Are we – “

“Tasha,” he says, and his voice sounds strange, echoing itself via the comm system and the external microphones of the suit. “It’ll be fine.”

She barks a laugh against the wind. “Babe, have you met us? We’re never, ever, ever fine. Other people are fine. Normal people are fine. Us? We are not fine. We don’t…”

She trails off, aware that she’s being ridiculous. Why shouldn’t they be fine? There’s two of them, going up against a ship full of HYDRA, followed by an elite STRIKE team and Captain Goddamn America. One of them has a damaged heart and a history of being kidnapped. The other is an amputee who has been brainwashed more often than you can shake a stick at. They’re screwed up. They’re damaged. They’re petty and vicious and angry and fucking stupid for attempting this and she thought she got over her nerves with Schüler, or the Iceberg, at the latest, but here she is, and she’s _afraid._

She swore herself, after Afghanistan, after Fury, after a dozen other instances, that no-one would ever get to make her afraid again.

And now she’s doing it herself.

“What if Cap – “

“You know that nothing will change, don’t you?” he interrupts, and for a guy who thought choking was a form of social interaction a few months ago, he’s pretty damn perceptive. “You and me, we’re a team. Neither Stevie nor Little Sister are going to change that.”

The ship is in sight now.

“Does she know you call her that? Because I get the feeling that she might murder you with her thighs if she did.”

“Tasha.”

“He’s Captain America, babe. Your best friend.”

“And you’re… you.”

“Rousing speech.”

“You put me back into my own skull, Tasha. You made me… me. I won’t just…,” he’s no better at words than she is, is he? “Tiger duckling, damn it.”

She snorts in disbelief. “I actually made you say tiger duckling. You beautiful fucking cinnamon roll.” And then, “I’d ravish you right here, but there’s a war to win, yadda, yadda. Giddyup.”

And then she loops low, skimming the deck behind a row of convenient containers, taking out two guards before the Winter Soldier even launches himself off her back and then it’s on like Friday night.

Pre-Afghanistan Friday night.

The suit warns her of two men approaching behind her and she spins in time to blast them both off the ship, hears Winter fire off one, two, three precise shots before the sounds of a fistfight reach her. She takes to the air, spins until she finds him, beating the shit out of a trio of soldiers that have teamed up. Shoots two more out of the fight before they reach him and then take a dive at the ship’s bridge, straight through the window.

The captain’s not there, but three officers are and one of them empties an entire clip onto her. Onto. Not into. When he’s done and his Glock clicks empty, she turns her head toward him with a mechanical whir. “Are you done?” she asks.

He sneers at her and moves to reload.

She doesn’t let him get that far.

“Bridge is clear,” she announces, once it’s done and she’s barricaded the door from inside. No-one without flight capacity is getting in here, now.

She gets a grunt in response, followed by a mournful, “Bad choice, fella. Bad choice.”

“Deck’s clear. Heading below.”

“On my way,” she agrees, takes off again and heads to the back of the ship, not bothering to open the door leading below deck. She simply crashes through and keeps going down narrow corridors, taking tight turns, arms half spread for balance. The armor is a finely tuned instrument of precise destruction, but it does pretty well as a battering ram, too. Anyone in the halls gets plowed over like a pin in a bowling alley.

Behind her, the Winter Solider is picking through rooms, taking down the ones smart enough to get out of the way while JARVIS feeds them both life signs in a neutral, detached tone.

“ _Miss Stark,_ ” he interrupts himself just as something behind her blows up a bit and Jamie hollers in her ear. Destructive asshole.

“Don’t blow the damn ship up! We still need that!”

“Spoil sport!”

“Yes, JARV?”

“ _It is 9.24 pm. May I suggest speeding up. ETA is thirty-seven minutes. It would be wise to prepare the arena._ ”

Right. That.

Coming up on a set of stairs, Tasha spins herself into a somersault and goes down legs first, kicking down two stragglers on their way to join the party. She hears bones break.

“Babe?”

“On it.”

Okay then. Okay.

+

“Cap, move it! We’ve got them!”

Steve jerks to attention before his head catches up with his ear and grabs his gear and shield before running after Brock toward the hangar where their plane always waits. He catches up to the other man halfway, matches his step.

“What’s happening?” he asks.

In lieu of an answer, Brock points toward the ship where a woman in a catsuit is waiting, red hair spilling over her shoulders. Natasha Romanov. “They’re attacking one of our mobile bases right now. She got us the intel.”

“Then how is she here?”

By then, they’re within earshot and Romanov pushes away from the hatch to meet them. “We’re talking about Natasha Stark, Captain. Using any sort of technology around her is a bad idea. I had to go low tech to get the intel to you reliably. Now, can we hold the chitchat for coffee after? They’re already at their target site.”

Reflexively, Steve checks his watch. 9.26 pm.

“Where are we going?”

She smirks mirthlessly as the hatch starts closing behind them, even as the plane starts taxiing toward the runway. “Middle of the ocean. SHIELD has a ship out there. And Iron Man and the Winter Soldier are going to kill everyone on it and sink it to the bottom of the ocean.”

Expression darkening, Steve asked, “How many on board?”

It’s Michaels who answers, handing over a tablet with a list of personnel pulled up already. “Full crew, twenty-four guard rotation and eleven scientists. Over fifty people.”

“Are we going to get there in time?” he asks, feeling the plane shift under his feet. Take off. He drops his gear, starts pulling out the pieces of his suit and stripping down, unselfconscious as only the army can make you.

The silence he receives is all the answer he needs.

+

“ETA two minutes,” the pilot announces and Steve isn’t ready. Not by far.

Seeing Bucky in pictures is one thing. Hearing the things Stark has made him do. But to face him? Will his friend recognize him? Or is he as blank, as empty, as Agent Romanov’s reports suggested?

Brock stands, orders, “Rollins, find high ground. The others go in in teams of two, swarming. Chance and Ramirez, left, Trev and Mickey, right. Brett and Anderson, guard the plane and cover our asses. Use the big lady, if you can. Romanov, I want you to focus on the Winter Soldier. You’re the only one who knows how he fights. Cap, Iron Man. You’re the only one that can make a dent in that bitch. I’ll be with you.”

Steve wants to protest the arrangement, but he knows it’s smart. However distracting he might be for Bucky, Bucky will definitely be at least as distracting for him.

He’s the super soldier. His place is where he can be used best.

So he nods and watches the others go over their kit one last time, making jokes, mock-punching each other in the shoulder. Gearing up for a hard battle. He might not be very close to any of them, but this, this is heart-breakingly familiar.

These are soldiers preparing to go into a battle they know they might not return from. A battle against Howard’s daughter turned monster, and his best friend turned mindless weapon.

He checks his shield’s clip on his back, tugs his gloves tighter.

Their pilot is fiercely focused, prepared to evade if Iron Man attacks them in the air, but nothing comes. They touch down on the ship’s deck with a howl of engines and nothing more.

Before the hatch is fully lowered, the first murmur rises from the unit. “Smells like a damn trap,” someone mutters and Steve can’t help but agree. Either Iron Man and the Winter Soldier are long gone, or they are waiting for the team to disembark. That means they are expected.

And that… only means bad things.

Once the hatch is fully down, the first pair crouches in the corners of it, providing cover while Rollins makes for high ground, a rocket launcher strapped to his back, along with his usual sniper rifle. Brett and Anderson set up a second launcher just inside the hatch. It limits the weapon’s range, but it also keeps it from being plucked up by Iron Man and dumped in the ocean, which is something that has happened before.

As soon Rollins has disappeared up a stack of shipping containers, the others move to flank and then surround the plane. Black Widow hangs back with the ones protecting their escape route. Steve tries to keep an eye on her, but for all that her hair glows in the dark, she can make herself almost invisible when she chooses.

He lets himself slide into that other mindset, the one that rarely ever fully leaves him anymore, these days. Captain America. He watches Brock undergo a similar transformation, turning from team leader to battle commander. Crossbones, now, not just Brock Rumlow.

“Steady,” he murmurs into his comm. “Steady people. They might just be below deck.”

Someone titters nervously. Brett arms the rocket launcher. “Think they’ll make us wait?” he asks.

There’s no chance to answer.

As if summoned, Iron Man surges up from nowhere, red and gold, light and fury, and fast, so much faster than Steve thought she’d be. The suit shows no indication of gender, a neutral, boxy shape, bristling with weapons. The voice that blares, “Hello, boys and girls!” across the deck is tinny and inhuman.

This is the most advanced weapon the world has ever seen. This is Howard’s daughter. This is the woman who stole Bucky and murdered dozens of innocents over the course of the past six months.

Steve draws his shield and braces as she loops once above their heads before going on a strafing run through their midst. Steve launches his shield automatically, but the woman is fast, so fast for such a bulky thing.

A stray thought. What would Howard think if he could see this?

He ducks one way, Brock rolls the other. Chance and Ramirez flatten themselves to the ground, but judging by the scream from Ramirez, they aren’t fast enough. Chance comes back up firing a second later, emptying an entire clip into Iron Man’s broad back to no avail. The bullets ricochet and the paint is barely scratched.

“Fucking bitch!” Chance screams and Iron Man turns and heads straight for her, aiming itself like a missile, only to pull up sharply as an actual missile, fired by Brett, slams into her projected path. It detonates against a container, sending both Chance and Ramirez flying while Iron Man simply rolls with the blast and aims for Ramirez again.

They’re still getting their bearings when Trevors suddenly screams. Michaels shouts, too, a hail of gunfire, and then nothing. Steve spins in time to see the Winter Solider kick Michaels’ knee out from under him and then grab his neck, twisting. Trevors is already down, a neat hole through his forehead.

The rest of STRIKE immediately opens fire on the Soldier, despite the fact that they know, they _know_ who he is. Who he was. To Steve.

Steve who stands and stares, helplessly, for a long moment. Bucky. Bucky, with his hair long and his face hidden behind a mask, Bucky with cold eyes and a hard gait, an aggressive economy of motion geared toward murder. Toward destruction. His left arm gleams in the ship’s floodlights. Metal. It’s made of metal and Steve wants to cry for what has been done to his best friend. He wants to cry for all that Bucky has lost because while Steve slept, Bucky was here, in the world, and he suffered.

There is no time to mourn because this, this is a stranger wearing Bucky’s face and Steve wants to make Iron Man _pay_ , but he can’t. Not right now.

He grits his teeth as the Soldier uses one of his team mates’ bodies for cover and then disappears around a container. Out of sight, just in time for Iron Man to swoop down again.

It’s coordinated, Steve realizes. They strike separately, at different points of the formation, quick and deadly and every time the unit shifts focus, they lose another man.

Chance gets picked up by Iron Man and carried high. She tries to fight, gets her legs around the suit’s waist, but she’s no match for the metallic strength. She falls forever, falls still when the shield hits Iron Man in the back, jerking her forward a good dozen feet before she regains her balance and turns to stare at Cap with cold, bright metal eyes.

Steve runs, leaps onto one container, then the next. Behind him, he hears gunfire as the team tries to get a bead on the Winter Soldier. Suddenly, the whir of a second missile as it heads for Iron Man, who ducks lazily.

It’s heat seeking, though, changes course, comes back down on the woman’s back just as Steve moves to attack. She gets flung forward like a ragdoll by the missile exploding against her suit and Steve intercepts her, grabs her shoulder and slams her bodily into the side of a yellow container.

Then Brock is there, emptying his gun into Iron Man’s chest, where the armor is dented, possibly compromised.

But Stark pulls back to her feet, ready to take off again, until one of her gloves misfires, sending her slumping backwards. Steve gets ready to swing the shield again when a flicker of movement catches his gaze.

Red hair moving in his periphery. What is Black Widow doing all the way over here?

He decides to ignore her while he has Iron Man grounded and within range, draws back the shield and lets it fly.

Something slams into it with a bright shower of sparks, derailing it enough to sail harmlessly over where Iron Man is crouched, shaking the damaged glove.

Steve has to overextend himself to catch his weapon on its return, lands on one knee and rounds on Agent Romanov, weapon still in hand from covering the downed metal suit. Her expression is as calm and poised as he has ever see it, but there is something burning in her green eyes.

Brock, weapon reloaded, missed most of the exchange, aims at Iron Man again, who huffs.

“Deal with the damn sniper, will you?” she demands in that inhuman voice. Then uses the non-damaged glove to force Brock on the defensive just as he swings his automatic around to aim at the traitor in their midst.

The woman rolls her eyes. “Work, work, work,” she grouses, adds something in Russian even as she dives for cover and then moves to get to Rollins’ position, above and behind them.

Iron Man shouts something after her. Sounds amused. Like this is a joke. He throws the shield. Her attention is still on keeping Brock occupied and she isn’t fast enough, takes the shield right in the mask, goes backward and down.

“That hurt, you asshole!” she screams as she gets back up, shaking her head to clear it, left arm twitching like something is malfunctioning. Brock aims, fires at the joints of the armor’s limbs.

Steve uses the chance to catch and throw again. A few more hits with the shield and the suit will crack like an egg. He puts all his strength behind it, draws back the shield the way he does when he tries to break concrete and lets it fly.

It never hits Iron Man, but stops dead halfway there, caught in a shining silver hand.

Over the rim of it, Bucky gives him a flat glare before firing it back and shooting a quick comment over his shoulder, also in Russian. He swings the shield around to block the storm of lead coming at him from Brock and whoever else is left, deflecting them like it’s nothing.

Does he remember wielding the shield? Or is it only his body that knows? Muscle memory or _Bucky_?

Iron Man huffs again , which looks really strange on a machine, and takes off just as the Black Widow reappears, calmly calling, “Sniper down!” and then leaping, landing next to the Soldier.

He speaks Russian again, and all Steve understands is her name. Natalia. He says it fondly, with a smile in his voice. The way he used to say ‘Stevie’.

Brock attacks with a snarl and the two assassins part, Romanov tucking into a roll while the Winter Soldier simply steps aside and lands a metal punch on Brock’s neck as he goes wide.

He’ll kill him.

Like he killed Trevors and Michaels, like Iron Man killed Chance, like Romanov probably killed Brett, Anderson and the pilot. Like Rollins. That leaves only Ramirez and Steve knows better than to hope.

He doesn’t want to fight Bucky. But he won’t let him murder any more innocents. His old friend would never forgive him if he did.

So he leaps and the next punch aimed for Brock is caught, blocked. He uses his hold to drive the other man back, kick at the rim of the shield. The Soldier drops it and Steve tucks and rolls, picks it up on the upward swing and uses it to land a powerful uppercut on the chin behind the mask.

A grunt of pain, but no visible damage. He remembers Bucky, completely out of it, in that lab, that dark, dirty lab, with god-knows-what pumping through his veins, meant to make him stronger. All it did was boost his immune system. Then. But that was seventy years of labs and experiments ago.

On the next swing, the shield is caught again, the slam of metal against metal powerful enough to make Steve’s teeth ache.

He pushes the shield sideways and down, opening the Soldier wide for a kick, which he catches, using it to twist Steve’s foot. He jumps over the move, tries for another kick. This one is a glancing blow and they part long enough for him to see that Brock has engaged the Black Widow and they are trading fast-paced punches and kicks, too close for firearms.

Then the Soldier is back and Steve evades, hits him in the back with the edge of the shield, making him stumble. “Stop!” he shouts. “Bucky, goddamn it, stop!”

He doesn’t really expect an answer out of the killing machine in front of him. Hopes, but doesn’t expect it. So when Bucky shakes his head, says, “Not yet,” he almost goes dizzy with relief.

“Bucky, come on, you don’t have to do this! Come back to SHIELD with me. They can help you. They can fix whatever she did to you!”

He can’t see the lower half of his best friend’s face, but he’s looked at it all his life and he knows the way the muscles pull around Buck’s eyes when he smiles. And he’s smiling now under his mask. There is blood on his hands and he’s smiling and his eyes are crystal clear and empty and he’s saying, “There’s no fixing me, Captain.”

And then he attacks again and it’s all Steve can do to try and keep any hits from landing, despite the shield. He tries to keep talking, tries to engage Bucky again, but he seems ferociously determined not to give Steve time to draw a single breath and he’s strong now, so strong. He aims for Steve’s head most of the time, and it takes him a minute to understand: Bucky is trying to subdue him. Hope and fear claw at him, neither winning.

Suddenly, a sharp, angry scream to his left. He risks a half-second glimpse, finds Romanov on her back, Brock above her, his hands around her neck, getting ready to twist, or squeeze. Something. His face is bloody, distorted in a rictus grin of dark delight. Steve only looks like a split second, doesn’t have time for more, but it’s enough to send a shudder down his spine. His teammate looks deranged.

Then Iron Man reappears out of nowhere, bowling him off of the other woman with a furious roar, punching him with the full weight of the armor behind it, again and again and again. Steve automatically moves to help Brock, but the Soldier cuts him off, again, again.

“Stop it!” he shouts at whatever’s left of Bucky. “You can’t do that! Don’t let her do that!”

Iron Man keeps punching. Shouting, now, angry and vicious, “Hail fucking HYDRA, you goddamn asshole!” and Brock finally goes limp.

Silence falls onto the ship and Steve realizes he’s wrapped up in the Soldier’s arms, being held back tightly. Held. Nothing more.

He stares over the man’s shoulder at the two women. Iron Man is helping Black Widow to her feet like she didn’t just beat a man to death, like the deck isn’t strewn with the people they just murdered. Three against ten and STRIKE never stood a chance. It was a trap from the beginning, meant to lure them out here. Lure _Steve_ out here.

All of them dead, because they wanted him.

Why?

“You’re monsters,” he hisses at the two, struggling once more against the Soldier’s grip and getting shoved back for his efforts. He catches his footing, braces for another attack. It doesn’t come.

Instead, the Soldier unclips his mask, folds it into a pocket of his pants. His face is worse than a punch to the gut could ever be. “That’s not nice, Stevie,” he says and there’s that Brooklyn drawl in his voice, there’s that little smirk, there’s… there’s _Bucky_. There’s Bucky with Steve’s childhood nickname dropping from his lips like it’s nothing and Steve’s knees almost buckle under the paingriefrelief of it.

There’s Bucky and his hands are bloody from murdering Steve’s teammates.

Black Widow stops gingerly prodding her arm. Iron Man opens her faceplate.

“This is on HYDRA,” she tells Steve, calmly collected despite the sweat on her face. “All of this is on HYDRA.”

She really is delusional. “HYDRA is dead.”

“HYDRA,” Black Widow corrects, “is SHIELD. We’ve been fooled, Captain.” Her voice is gentle in a way he’s never heard it. She sounds apologetic. But there’s blood on her hands, too.

No. He can’t believe that. SHIELD has been good to him, has helped him find a place in this world. They haven’t been going around killing without provocation. They haven’t brainwashed –

\- except -

“Was any of it true? Anything you said?”

The Russian shrugs. “Up to a point. The Winter Soldier. Red Room. Yes. Not what came after.”

After. Stark.

Stark, who bats her lashes. “Oh, you’ve been talking about me? All naughty things, I hope!”

The Soldier rolls his eyes and it’s so _Bucky_ , that Steve wants to weep, to rage, to pray. “Not now, Tasha.”

“Why not? Now is the perfect time. Teetwo is wounded. She might succumb to our charms now and finally agree to that threesome. Right, sweetheart?” She turns a simpering look on the other woman, who snorts derisively and Steve feels bile rise.

A threesome?

Does that mean… does that mean she’s been using Bucky for sex? Has been –

“You’re a menace, Stark,” the Black Widow counters, coolly. “Help me get to the plane.”

“But…”

“Now.”

Iron Man gives in, heaving the redhead up bridal style, despite the fact that her legs work fine, and disappearing without a look back, ignoring the Russian swearing at her.

The Soldier shrugs. “Don’t mind the Tashas. Half the time, I’m not even sure they like each other.”

He sounds… if Romanov was lying about what Natasha Stark did, if she was lying about not believing the story about HYDRA, then that means she thinks SHIELD is compromised and that Stark is the solution. But if she lied about that, maybe she also lied about caring about the Winter Soldier, in her own way. Maybe she’s a mercenary and Stark pays best. But Bucky almost sounds like Bucky, but if he’s himself, then he just helped murder Steve’s team without warning or reason. But if he’s himself, then he must have had a reason because Bucky would never – but the Winter Soldier would. The Winter Soldier has, and how can Steve know where one ends and the other begins. If they are separate things at all?

And the rage. The hatred and anger. All the scenes of carnage, all the dead. All the broken bodies, the mutilated agents. He can’t just forget that. Can’t forget that, for the past month, he has dreamed of killing Natasha Stark to save Bucky and to give Howard some measure of peace.

Logic is one thing, the head, but Steve has never listened to that particular organ much. A heart person, his mother always said, fondly and sadly, like that was a bad thing.

They just slaughtered his team in front of him, bantered over their corpses like their deaths were meaningless. During the war, the Commandos always talked shit during missions. To hype each other up, distract each other. But after each battle, silence fell. It was a way to respect the fallen, to grieve the things they gave for their country. To regain their humanity.

This is the opposite of that.

And he can’t just let that go.

Before he figures out what he’s supposed to do now – his team is dead, his transport stolen, his lost friend some other animal entirely – Bucky speaks.

“Come on, Steve. Let’s get out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” he snaps before his brain catches up with his mouth. But it’s true.

It’s true.

“Why not? Not like there’s anything left here. And you want to get off this ship before Tasha’s going away present counts down to zero.” A bomb. That’s where Iron Man went. To plant a bomb.

He tightens his grip on the shield’s straps, fights the urge to punch the Soldier in the face. “You just killed my team!”

“Were you listening?! They were HYDRA!”

He lets a punch fly. It catches Bucky by surprise, makes him stumble before he catches himself, hits back. And then they’re rolling around the ground like the rowdy punks they were, before the war, punching, kicking, screaming.

“They were people!” Kick to the knee.

“No, they weren’t! They were fucking HYDRA!” Fist to the kidneys.

“You killed them!” Elbow to the cheek.

“Yes, I did! You gonna kill me now, _Captain America_!?” Stillness.

Steve, kneeling on Bucky’s arms, holding him at bay with the shield pressed to his chest, freezes.

“I should,” he whispers, a shock of sound, of confession. “I should. You’ve… you’re…”

You have become everything I swore to kill.

He came here to save his friend. “You have to see that what you’re doing… what she’s made you do…”

“Tasha doesn’t _make_ me do anything. Is that what they told you? That she’s a monster? That I’m a victim?”

“Agent Romanov did.”

“Natalia was working an angle. Come on, Steve, it’s me. You know me. You know I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“Do I?” Because Steve knows Bucky, but Bucky would never have murdered Steve’s team and joked about it. Bucky never would have….

Bucky’s face drops and he goes entirely still under the weight of Steve and the shield. Submitting. A lifetime of tussling with him makes sure Steve knows better than to believe it. “I’m still working on remembering things. You. But I do remember the important bits. I died for you, once. This,” he twitches his left arm, metal all the way, “is what came after. I’m not the guy you knew. Hell, some days, I’m not sure I’m a person at all. Tasha tells me I am, though, and she’s a pretty smart dame. But even when I didn’t know a thing about myself, when I was still blank, I remembered… something. Blue eyes and bony elbows and that I wasn’t allowed to smoke around you. I remembered that.”

He shrugs like he’s not sure what point he’s trying to make, or why he even said all that. Like he didn’t mean to rip out Steve’s heart with a few words and dance on the bloody remains. Then he shakes his head. “Tasha prepped the engine room to blow in three minutes. You can either come with us, or you can swim. Your choice.”

“You just expect me to come along? You just _killed my team_ in front of me. I knew these people, Buck! I worked with them! They were my friends.” Or they might have been, one day. Brock’s face, darkly twisted as he knelt on Romanov and squeezed shoots through his mind, briefly.

“They were HYDRA.”

“They were people!” Round and round again and Steve had forgotten. He’d forgotten how stubborn they can both be, how stupid with each other and their anger and the memory _hurts_.

“So was I!” Bucky screams it right in his face, loud and angry and _hurt_ and Steve has heard Bucky’s voice all his life, has listened to the cadence and messages of it, but he’s never heard it like this. Broken. Full of hate. “So was I.”

He takes his weight off Bucky’s arms, lets him scramble backwards and away, says, “The Bucky I knew couldn’t kill like this. In cold blood.”

He knows it’s not true even as he says it, remembers his best friend sniping at the enemy with frightening efficiency. But there is something like satisfaction in his gaze when he looks at Brock’s body, now, and that isn’t - “Like it’s fun.”

A fluid roll of shoulders is the answer he gets. “I go by James, now,” Bucky says, like that means anything. Then he taps the watch on his metal wrist. “Two minutes left.”

If the ship blows with him on it, Steve is as good as dead and they both know it. “Do I have a choice?”

An arm rises, points west. “Land about fifty miles that way. I think.” Then a quiet snort. “If you think I’ll leave you here, you’re dumber than Tasha thinks you are. Don’t make me drag you.”

Setting his jaw, Steve considers his options, of subduing the women, taking back the plane. Of gathering the dead before the explosion. Of returning to SHIELD, with or without prisoners.

Beside him, too close by dint of old instincts, Bucky reaches up toward his ear. Then he sighs at whatever her hears over comms. In the open hatch of the plane, Iron Man suddenly screams.

When Steve turns to look, something hard and unyielding hits him brutally in the neck. The artificial arm, the thinks, as his shield drops, shortly followed by his body and everything goes back. Bucky knocked him out with that damn arm.

+

Tasha makes sure the steel cables around the good Captain’s wrists are tight – again – and then sits back on her haunches, staring. It’s kind of weird to see her childhood hero, her father’s larger-than-life friend, America’s idol, trussed up like a turkey. Wrong. He’s bruised and bloody and limp and it… doesn’t suit him.

No wonder Jamie is all fidgety, sitting a safe distance away, watching him like a hawk. His hands twitch every now and then, like he wants to reach out. To help a friend, and Tasha can’t help but wonder if this was a good idea. Bucky Barnes followed Steve Rogers literally all of his life.

If he called for Bucky to leave now, would Jamie go?

But that’s her abandonment issues speaking up again, and she can’t have that. Since Jamie has gone silent for the moment, she decides to find distraction elsewhere.

“So,” she drawls, straightening out of her crouch and making her way toward the cockpit, where Natalia is steering them toward the coast, where they have an exit waiting for them. Since they’ll abandon the plane as soon as possible, Tasha hasn’t bothered tampering with it beyond disabling any and all tracking options. The rest she’ll leave to their pilot.

She plonks her metallic ass into the co-pilot seat. “Have any Terminator jokes been made yet? Because, Teetwo, you are a mean, lean killing machine and I draw my hat to your deadly thighs. That was some smooth action out there and you didn’t even break a sweat, did you?”

Maybe it’s not very polite, complimenting an assassin on her murder technique, but then, Tasha is not a very nice person. And the Terminator joke has been burning on her tongue for weeks, to be honest. T2. “You’d make a mean Arnie.”

The Russian spy in question slants a look at Tasha. “You are not John Connor,” she parries, without missing a beat.

“Glad to know my pop culture education is paying off,” Tasha snarks back, “But obviously, no. JARVIS would be Skynet in this scenario and that just doesn’t work, at all.”

“ _I am offended, Miss Stark, I hope you realize._ ”

She coos at him a little, then waves him off. “Whatever. I’d be… you know what, I’d totally be a vengeance demon. Patron saint of brainwashed assassins everywhere. Make a wish and I’ll castrate someone for you. Or, you know, smear them into fine paste. Which is kind of disgusting if you think about it. What would you even do with finely smeared enemy? Put it into jars? That’s… okay, no, that joke totally got away from me, sorry. Still, though, vengeance demon. You two can by the Anyas to my D’Hoffryn. My itty-bitty vengeance apprentices. Oh, this is good!”

She claps her hands and ignores the way Teetwo looks half annoyed, half grateful, or the way Jamie has finally stopped twitching and closed his eyes to listen to her make an ass out of herself, just keeps rambling on until she runs out of steam. Which, incidentally, doesn’t happen for quite a while.

+

Tasha lets her inane monologue trail off at some point en route to New York and he misses it almost immediately, because now he has nothing to do but stare at his long lost best friend and try to figure out how to fix things.

Natalia, bless her, tries to distract him with starting up the argument again about whether or not it’s smart to go back to the mansion, but they’ve talked it to death already – SHIELD will think Steve is dead, too, and they’ve known where Tasha is all along, Iron Man and Natasha Stark are still perfectly separate entities – so it doesn’t hold his interest the way Tasha’s crazy ramblings do, never going in a straight line.

He’s left in silence, staring at Steve and wondering. He knows where he went wrong. He knows that killing STRIKE in front of Steve was a mistake, but it didn’t even occur to him until those blue eyes looked at him, full of betrayal.

Knows that it didn’t occur to Tasha either. Natalia, maybe, but if she didn’t see a better option, she wouldn’t have spoken up.

He’s so used to killing, to taking down the enemy with extreme prejudice, that he didn’t consider how it would look to Steve. Steve, who always tried to keep people alive, who protected more than he attacked. Bucky was like that, once. He thinks. A good soldier, one who killed only when necessary and hated it anyway. He isn’t like that now. Killing, to him, is a learned response. Eliminate a threat. Make sure your back is free. Fulfill the mission. Leaving STRIKE alive at their backs would have been impossible. His instinct and the vestiges of his programming wouldn’t have allowed it.

So he killed them all and forgot that Steve was watching. That Steve knew them. That Steve has always, always been the kind of idiot who thinks with his heart and not his head.

He didn’t even consider that his word might not be enough for Steve. That a simple, “this is the enemy, fight with me,” might not mean to Steve what it once did. Natalia may have done too good a job.

He doesn’t know how to fix this, because the problem isn’t what he did. It’s who he is. And that isn’t something that can be fixed. Shouldn’t be, Tasha would point out, if he told her, but mostly: can’t. He’s damaged beyond repair and that’s okay. He knows it, he’s functional.

He’s better. Gets better, still, all the time.

But he’ll never be what he was. James now, not Bucky.

He wonders if Steve will, in time, be able to forgive that.

+

Steve comes to in a cell.

It’s the nicest cell he’s ever been in, including the one at SHIELD when he woke up, but it’s still got a locked door and as soon as he steps toward the window, a blue, shimmering light flares to life across the glass. Some kind of force field. He reaches into his pocket, feels for the tiny square sewn into his uniform pants. Relaxes as soon as he finds it. Decides to leave it there for the moment and examine the room.

It’s expensively furnished, but bland. Bed, dresser, table, chair. All of it in dark wood. The drawers are all empty, there are no pictures on the wall, no vases, no knickknacks. Nothing, short of the furniture itself, that could be used as a weapon. The en suite bathroom is equally empty, except for an obviously new set of clothing, underwear, sweat pants, t-shirt, socks. He ignores it, only uses the sink and a pristine towel to clean the dirt, sweat and blood off his face and hands. Stays in his uniform.

He isn’t sure where he is, but he can guess, based on the décor. How did he get here? He’s still trying to figure out what happened after Bucky knocked him out, when the door opens and the man in question slips into the room.

“Hey, Steve,” he says, smiling crookedly. He’s out of his battle armor, his hair twisted up in a messy bun, dressed in sweatpants and a t-shirt – identical to the ones sitting unused in the bathroom - that leaves his left arm bare. It’s metal all the way up, perfectly human-shaped and perfectly inhuman at the same time.

He notices Steve looking, shrugs. It’s a bit lopsided, that shrug, but it looks fluid. Smooth. “I landed on my arm. When I fell. At least that’s what the files say. I don’t remember, most of the time. They cut off the rest of it to make room for a prosthesis.” He clenches his fist. The mechanisms inside whir almost soundlessly. “Tasha made me this one. It lets me feel things again, which is nice. And better on the dishes, to be honest.”

All that horror, all that pain, packaged in a few bland sentences. Like losing a limb is an everyday tragedy. Like it’s in any way, shape or form alright. Like it isn’t Steve’s fault, for letting him fall in the first place. But just like there’s no resentment in Bucky’s words, there’s also no blame. Steve swallows and can’t meet those unfamiliar familiar eyes.

Doesn’t want to.

“Where am I?”

Another shrug. It feels like a taunt. “Home. Tasha’s place in New York. Well, Howard’s, really. Tasha hates it here. You should see…,” he trails off and Steve finally realizes that he’s nervous. Bucky is nervous. About this. Seeing Steve. Talking to him.

Or maybe he just wants Steve to think that. How can he trust anything he sees or hears? How much is genuine Bucky, how much Winter Soldier calculation? How much is Natasha Stark being the genius she is hailed as? She convinced the Black Widow of her insane cause, after all.

He bites the inside of his cheek and pretends the other man is simply wearing a mask. A Bucky mask. A scare tactic. Still can’t meet those eyes. The ice was that shade of blue, sometimes, when the light reached his dark prison and shimmered through his eyelids. His nightmares were happy, on those days. “So what happens now? You’ve got me. What’s next?”

Bucky steps back until he hits the closed door, slides down it to sit comfortably curled up. Making himself vulnerable. Bracing is elbows on his knees, he shrugs. Again. “We don’t _have_ you. The plan is the same as it was with Natalia – Natasha. Romanova. We show you what we know and then it’s up to you. Stick with us, or go back to HYDRA.”

He looks pained and Steve can’t know if it’s the prospect of letting a threat go, or of him leaving. He shoves down the question, focuses on the easier bits.

“SHIELD is not HYDRA!” His anger flares again with the words, fiery hot. His head is still pounding from being knocked out. His team is dead.

“And how would you know? You’ve been frozen solid for the past seventy years,” Bucky snaps, then immediately flinches, presses his back tighter against the door, visibly calming himself. He won’t meet Steve’s gaze either, always looks just a little past him, above his shoulder. The way he used to, when he couldn’t look a superior officer in the face without punching him.

He doesn’t apologize.

“You killed my team.”

“Because they were HYDRA.”

“They were good people.”

_So was I!_

They’re going in circles and Steve’s head pounds in time with his heartbeat. His lungs seize with remembered asthma-pain and his eyes burn and he _hates_ and has no idea who.

Bucky links his fingers around his drawn up knees and squeezes until his flesh digits turn white, then red. When he lets go, he fumbles around his pockets and lights himself a cigarette. He tried to get Steve to smoke, during the war, but after a lifetime of conditioning to stay away from smoke, Steve never even tried. After a few puffs, Bucky seems calmer. “I did… did you read any reports on the Winter Soldier? About what I… he did? About all the people I killed? I was brainwashed into that. I was… a machine. And that was my function and I…,” he swallows. Pauses. Inhale, exhale through the nose, like some ancient, fire-breathing beast. “These good people you keep telling me about, they did the same things I did. They murdered, they tortured. They wiped entire families off the face of the earth. But they didn’t need to be brainwashed. They didn’t need to be wiped clean. They did it of their own free will, Steve. Your friend Rumlow, he went by another name.”

“Crossbones,” Steve supplies. A codename, graceless and blunt, as they are wont to be. Captain America isn’t exactly a paragon of subtlety.

“Yeah. You think he got that name from petting kittens?” Ash from his cigarette flutters onto the heavy carpet. He either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.

“He was following orders.”

“HYRDA’s orders.” Bitter. He sounds so bitter, so derisive, stubs out the smoke in the palm of his metal hand and flicks the stub toward a little trash can in the corner.

There is a mulish set to his face, one that says they can keep going round and round until they’re both blue in the face. Steve used to enjoy these fights, both of them butting heads, but that was then. That was when he knew the other man better than he knew himself, knew that, at the end of the fight, they would always still be friends.

He dreamed of this day. Today. Now. Reunion. Even before he made the connection between James Winter and Bucky Barnes, he dreamed of the day he would get to be reunited with his best friend. They would fall into each other’s arms, would hug for a long time. And then Bucky would make some smart comment and ruffle Steve’s hair and they’d sit down and have a quiet drink, or go see a picture. Maybe find a dance hall. It would be like it used to be.

The dream changed when Romanov shared her horror stories of the Winter Soldier. Instead of jokes, there were tears, sometimes. Hesitant recounting of memories. A more tentative happiness, a more careful relief.

Never, in any of those dreams, did this happen. Never in those dreams were they on opposite ends of a battle. Never did they fight, in those dreams. Never did Bucky kill Steve’s people in front of him and not even apologize.

“I thought this would go a lot differently,” he mutters, doesn’t even realize he’s spoken out loud until Bucky snorts a bitter laugh.

“You think?”

“It’s not funny.”

A headshake. “No, it’s not. It’s stupid. Pretty fucking dumb, in fact,” he says and Steve flinches at his language because Bucky always had a filthy mouth, but never like this. Never so full of broken glass. “Because somehow I thought you would trust me. That I would tell you the truth and you would believe me. But I guess you can’t do that, can you, Stevie?”

“I trust you, Buck,” he snaps back immediately, automatic defense, as old as his bones. “But you said it yourself. You go by another name these days.”

Natasha Stark beat Brock to death and Bucky – James – stood by and did nothing. Held Steve back. He rubs both hands over his face, sits at the edge of the bed he woke up on. Stares at the floor with his head in his palms.

“You realize that you’re basing most of your intel on the false information Natalia fed you, right?”

He does. But at the same time, he knows Romanov can’t have lied too much. There was a framework of credibility she had to work within. “The Winter Soldier?”

Stony silence from the door. For a long moment, he thinks he won’t get an answer, even though they both know it already, anyway.

“True.”

“Stark finding you and waking you?”

“True.”

“Using you to get to SHIELD? HYDRA. Whatever you want to call it.”

“False. I was the one who showed HYDRA to her. Who asked her to fight with me. And Tasha doesn’t use people. Ever. She’s liable to punch you in the face for even suggesting it.”

“Violence does seem to be her style.”

“And you trying to take her head off with the shield was friendly?”

He looks up, finds the other man on his knees by the door, looking angry.

“Why are you defending her? You owe her nothing!”

“I owe her everything!”

“She’s using you!”

And then Bucky is on his feet, so, so fast, flying at Steve like vengeance in black and silver, hand moving for his neck and Steve barely manages to throw himself backwards in time to avoid having his larynx crushed by a metal fist. He punches Bucky in the stomach, shoves him off, rolls out from under him.

As they land on the floor on opposite sides of the study bedframe, he shouts, “Look at you! You’re an attack dog! You’re – “

“The Winter Soldier.” Bucky cuts him off, voice sharp with an accent Steve heard sometimes, during the war. Russian. “I’m a weapon. But Tasha isn’t the one pulling the trigger. I do that. Me. James Winter. No-one else. Why the hell are you so bent on hating her? You never even met the woman!”

Why is he? Why does her name make something curdle in his stomach, put a taste of rotten egg in his mouth. Why does she make him so angry?

Romanov actively betrayed him and STRIKE. Bucky killed half the team. But it’s Stark who makes him mad. Who makes him want to kill. It’s Stark who makes him want to _hurt_ her.

He opens his mouth, not knowing what is about to come out of it, when the door swings open and the woman in question comes marching in, hands on her hips. She’s wearing jeans and a tank top, both smeared with grease. The circle between her breasts glows brightly and her hair is in a loose bun, coming undone around her face, the same way Bucky’s does. She looks completely unlike any photograph Steve has seen of her.

“Okay, boys,” she announces, voice too loud, bright, forceful. “Playtime’s over. Babe, Teetwo is smashing shit in the gym. Go play with her. Captain, you and me need to have a conversation.”

Before Steve can argue, Bucky growls something that Steve only partially understands. It seems to be English, to some degree, because he can make out his own name, ‘deal’ and ‘mine’, but the rest is a foreign language. Russian, probably.

Stark answers in the same pigeon and hooks a thumb over her shoulder toward the door. Without a layer of perfectly applied makeup, there are frown lines around mouth and on her forehead. Crow’s feet at her eyes. A small scar high on her left cheek, paler than her fading tan. She’s too thin, all whipcord muscle and bone. Too old.

Bucky looks mutinous for a moment, before snapping off a curse and letting his shoulders drop. “I hate you,” he grumbles, without fire.

When he draws even with Stark, he puts his arm around her waist briefly, squeezes, and presses a kiss to her jawline. She finds a loose strand of his hair, pulls on it. Smiles softly and rubs their cheeks together.

Mutters something that involves ‘grease’. When Bucky pulls back, he has a black streak across his face to match hers. He hip checks her and, with a single glare back at Steve, leaves.

Bucky, who spent his life fighting tooth and nail to stay with Steve, to keep them together, to never leave him alone, simply walks out. Either he trusts Stark implicitly, or he doesn’t care at all anymore.

Unbidden, Steve’s fingers trace the tiny, tiny nub hidden in the fabric of his left pocket.

Natasha drops her hands from her hips, points toward the bed and orders, “Sit.”

When he doesn’t move, she rolls her eyes. “Okay, then. Stay standing for the next hour.” She claps her hands and pulls a small cube form her pocket, sets it up on the dresser across from the bed.

It shifts, unfolds, starts to glow. A moment later, the Stark Industries logo lazily spins in thin air in middle of the room, perfectly realistic except for the slight blue hue overlaying everything.

Stark starts flicking her fingers through it, opening the kind of menu Steve recognizes from a computer, flipping through folders at breakneck speeds, too fast for him to track, much less read.

While she works, she starts talking. “I know why you’re so pissed at me, by the way. In case you haven’t worked it out yet.” She stops with one finger inside a little folder of blue light, a circle pulsing around it. Looks at him curiously.

“Enlighten me,” he rumbles, fights the urge to cross his arms over his chest. He still has his exit strategy. He tells himself to be patient, to not be so defensive. All it got him so far, was Bucky abandoning him to her. Howard’s daughter. He would be so ashamed.

She moves her finger and the folder opens, filling the room with pictures. Portraits, all of them, of men in white lab coats. He has a bare second to try and make sense of them before Stark strides through them like they’re not there at all, stops right in front of him, so close that she has to tilt her head to look up at him. It should make her look fragile, small, but it doesn’t. She’s slim and short, bare in her skimpy top and torn jeans, unarmed and impossibly breakable to someone like him, but all she looks is fierce.

In the oldest pictures he found of her, she’s barely four, already glaring the reporter into submission, a glint of mayhem in her eye.

“Someone stole your best friend from you. The only person in the world you had left and they took him. HYDRA took him. But HYDRA is a nameless, faceless abstract and if you’re honest with yourself, you still don’t understand how or why or what they did to Bucky. You’re not sure they even exist. All you know is that the man you knew is gone and you need someone to blame.”

Her lips quirk sardonically, darkly amused and not a little hurt behind it and he understands that expression only because he’s seen in a thousand times on another face. “And I’m sure Old Nick didn’t skimp on the details of all the bad, bad things I’ve done. Let me be the first to congratulate you on your fine taste in scapegoats, Captain. Now sit the fuck down and listen, because HYDRA does have a face and I am about to show it to you.”

She claps again, turns away from him like disobedience isn’t even an option and as the images spin until they’re facing them, magic or technology, Steve finds it isn’t. He sits.

“These are forty-nine HYDRA scientists that were brought into SHIELD under the aegis of Project Paperclips after the end of the war….”

+

It takes forty-seven minutes for Stark to lay out all her evidence and the whole time, Steve doesn’t get a word in edgewise. It’s intentional, he’s sure, and grating. She psychoanalyzes him and then runs roughshod over him for almost an hour afterward.

Still, after minute twenty-three, the urge to stick his hand in his pocket and feel for his exit strategy fades significantly.

“Q – E – fucking – D,” she finally snaps with a flourish of waving arms. “That’s Latin and means you may now apologize for being a disbelieving dick. And in case you don’t have a good hate-on going yet, here, have some light reading.”

And she slaps open another file with blunt movements of her hands. Inside, the first folder is titled 1945. The last is 1996. “The Winter Soldier’s mission logs. There’s a trash can in the corner by the desk for when you need to puke. And you will need to puke. I know I did and my threshold for horror is pretty high these days.”

She waves her arms around again, then makes to leave while Steve is still trundling in the wake of her hurricane, a ship without a port. “And when you’ve got your head on straight, we’ll be downstairs in the living room!”

“Wait!” he calls, just before she slips outside. He doesn’t expect her to listen, but to his surprise, she does.

“Why…,” he has no idea what he’s even asking. “Why are you doing this?”

She blushes. She honest to god blushes, like has asked her for a dirty picture, or something, instead of a simple question. She ducks her head and for a moment, he doesn’t think she’ll answer. Then she takes a deep breath and makes a decision.

She points at the floor. “There’s a boy downstairs, _Captain_ , and he’s mine.”

Fury wells in him like it was never gone. “He’s not-!”

“Shut up! I’m talking. He’s mine. He’s mine and if he asks me to set HYDRA on fire, I’m the one with the matches. And if he asks me to get him back his best friend, I’m the one who’s going to hold you down until you give in. Because _he is mine_ and I take care of my things.”

Her smile is sharp and ugly, her implication clear: unlike him.

With that she nods decisively and spins on her heel, marching out. This time he doesn’t try to stop her.

+

Natalia is hungry.

Even if she’d never admit it, stressful situations like missions, give her strange cravings. Tonight – or rather, this morning – she wants waffles. With chocolate slathered all over them.

In Red Room, there was never any thought of fulfilling these cravings. With SHIELD, she indulged only rarely, when she could get away with it unnoticed, unwilling to broadcast a potential weakness or quirk. Something that could be exploited.

She tried to hide it here, too, at first.

But the first time she gave in and went to ransack the kitchen at three in the morning, she found it brightly lit and filled with life. Tasha starts making coffee concoctions with truly frightening caffeine content when she can’t sleep and JARVIS locks her out of her workshop. It happens a lot. And James, whose nightmares are about ice and snow and his arm radiating cold, drinks tea and hot chocolate a lot. Hot chocolate, Natalia has learned, on nights where the snow is tinged red. Tea when it’s left pristine.

She found them, that first time, sitting at the kitchen island, James with a single mug in front of him, Tasha with half a dozen different ones, sharing a plate of burnt cookies between them. Because of course Tasha can’t just sit still when she’s full of caffeine and afraid to go to sleep, and of course James indulges her every whim.

This time, Natalia finds them chopping up random vegetables into huge, evenly cut piles. There is no pot on the stove and seemingly no rhyme or reason to what they’re cutting. Well, James is cutting. Tasha still seems to be in the caffeine-creation stages, occasionally stealing bits of carrot from the chopping board.

They both have dark rings under their eyes and they are tense as piano wires, despite being freshly showered. Captain Rogers, she assumes, as she stops in the doorway, tries to figure out where she’d be best of use right now.

Tasha lists in front of the coffee maker, mumbling to it in sentence snippets. Big Brother keeps chopping and chopping and chopping with mechanical precision, his legs spread, feet at shoulder width. Ready for a fight. Drowsily, Tasha reaches over to steal something else from the board. Zucchini this time. She doesn’t realize what it is until she’s chewing, grimaces.

Spits it into the sink and reaches across the assassin to get at the carrots, which taste better raw. She gets smacked with the flat of the blade for her troubles, followed by a short reprimand, “I’m going to take your fingers off, if you keep doing that.”

“I’ll make myself new ones.”

“Without fingers? I don’t think so. Behave.”

“What’re you even doing? Are you making stew again?” Stew is about the only thing he can cook. Out of anything, really, and it tastes fine, but there is only so much stew a person can stomach, apparently.

Since Tasha’s abilities run toward breakfast foods, steaks, and not much else, they have a lot of stew when they don’t order in.

He falters briefly, takes in the amount of vegetables in various bowls around his workstation. “Maybe?” he hedges.

“Where did you even get all those veggies?”

They are talking in their own language, that lilting mixture that has lately started to develop some sort of system. Not quite grammar, but it seems less random. Natalia, who understands the words perfectly, but not always their jumble of made up syntax, listens with interest. Sometimes, they speak to her in that same language and she tries not to feel something warm flare in her chest every time they include her so effortlessly in their intimacy.

It’s that inclusion, that willingness to let her in, that makes her speak up now, instead of slink away, back into the bowels of the mansion.

“I bought them to make a casserole,” she announces. Neither of them jumps when she does. “Where are the tomatoes?”

James hands them over willingly enough, watches her as she puts on a pot of water to boil them briefly and then skin them for the sauce. Tasha, finished with her coffee art, hops up to sit on the counter by James’ side, her back to the cupboards. Covering the door for all of them.

As soon as the water boils, she drops in the tomatoes and lets them sit for a minute before pouring them out into the sink and turning on the cold water. _You need to scare them._ She remembers that, a warm, soft voice showing her how to do this, hot, then cold. _Scare them right out of their skin._ She can’t remember who the voice belonged to, only large hands on her small ones, guiding them, and the smell of cloves on the breath against her ear.

It’s a good memory.

“Watcha doing?” Tasha asks between sips.

“Scaring them out of their skin,” she answers. Maybe in Russian, maybe in English. It is hard to tell with them, hard to care.

She peels the fruit with her fingers, drops them, still hot inside, on the chopping board. “Large cubes,” she requests, fetches a pan and looks through the bowls of vegetables until she finds onions, covered in bell peppers to keep their biting oils out of the air.

She fixes the sauce with James’ help, gets Tasha to stack the vegetables in a large baking pan, layered with grated cheese. When it’s done, she pours the sauce over everything. Watches the other woman gleefully spread even more cheese over the top.

They put it all in the oven, set the timer for an hour. No-one likes crunchy carrots, Tasha declares and Natalia doesn’t feel like fighting, simply nudges Big Brother until he makes her a hot chocolate, too. They sit companionably around the island, waiting as the smell of food fills the air. The craving for waffles has passed, half-stilled by the rich chocolate in the mug in front of her, half-transferred to the delicious casserole baking in the oven.

It’s five in the morning and they are mostly silent, except for Tasha’s random comments and the way they all occasionally check on their food or fetch a refill. Natalia’s feet get cold, so she makes them shuffle places, sits on the counter by the oven, feet dangling in front of the source of heat.

Her vantage point allows her to see the Captain as soon as he arrives, dressed in the clothes James set out for him before the _Lemurian Star_. He slows to a halt when their gazes meet, considers, then melt backwards into the shadows. He doesn’t leave, just waits. Watches.

Natalia turns back to where Tasha is conducting an experiment on mini marshmallows in coffee.

+

He knows Romanov sees him, but she seems content to let him be, which seems unlike her. But she’s also wearing leggings and thick wool socks, along with a hoodie that reads _DPA_ in neon letters. Her hair is pulled into a sloppy braid. She looks less than put together for the first time since he met her. Human, perhaps.

Softer.

Bucky and Stark at sitting a bit to the right, close enough for their shoulders to brush, staring at something in a mug. When he realizes Romanov won’t tattle on him, Steve drops back a few paces until he can’t see them anymore. He considered walking out the front door when he found he could leave his cell, but curiosity drew him in and the faint shimmer of light over the door clued him in that he isn’t as free as he seems. A gilded cage, a neat trick. It fueled his anger anew.

So he hangs back, hides out of sight. Waits.

He can still hear them, though. They’re speaking in their strange language again, but he understands enough to make out that there are apparently marshmallows in Stark’s coffee.

She thinks that coffee is awesome and so are marshmallows, so any combination must be even better. Bucky argues that chocolate and fish are both good, too, and she wouldn’t combine those, which makes her give a thoughtful hum, like she’s considering it.

Silence. He’s about to check what they’re doing, when Romanov makes a face. “Are you falling asleep in your coffee?” she asks. In English.

“What!? No! Wide awake! Wide awake! Tell her how awake I am, Bandit!”

Bucky, drily, obeys. “She’s awake.”

The redhead smirks. “I can see that. Very impressive.”

“Oh, shut up. I know for a fact that you slept last night, while I was up with that one,” – presumably Bucky - , “helping him over his case of the vapors at the idea of seeing the Great Pumpkin Steve Rogers again.”

“That’s why you snuck out of bed before me to head to the workshop.”

“I was preparing for your imminent breakdown.”

“By tinkering with the reactor.”

“Yes.”

More silence. Romanov gets up to refill her mug from a carafe next to the coffee maker. Sits back down where she can see Steve. Blows on her drink.

“Do I need to worry?” Bucky asks, quietly.

“Nah, babe. I’m fine. Not dying any more than usual. Scout’s honor.”

“Promise?” In lieu of watching the two people speaking, he watches Romanov, perched on the kitchen. Her eyes are dark in the overhead lights, and she averts her gaze from them, lets her hair hide her face for a moment.

A snort. “Hey, man, where’s the trust?”

“You didn’t tell me last time.” This is what Bucky sounded like when Steve had another asthma attack and hid it from him.

“Because there was nothing you could have done. But, sure, promise. You know, you’re kind of loopy, too, if you’re this emotional. Stop hating on my sleep deprivation.”

“I’m not emotional. You’re just an idiot.”

“Are too.”

“Are not.”

“Children!” Silence, awkward shuffling. “The food is ready.” Natalia looks from them to Steve. “Would you like to join us, Captain?”

At the sudden scrutiny, Steve automatically pulls his hands from his pockets. Nods. “If that’s alright,” he hedges. “I have a few questions.”

Tries not to look at the smug grin on Stark’s face, the naked relief on Bucky’s. Tries not to think of fifty files full of horrors he couldn’t look at and the anger still curdling in his gut, of Stark killing Brock, of Bucky holding him back, of the wounded look on his face when Steve fought him. He tries to look at the man by the table like he would a stranger, someone he just met, instead of the oldest of all his ghosts. It doesn’t really work.

What is he even doing here? Why hasn’t he pressed that little button hours ago? Why is he standing in this kitchen like he wants to be here? Like he belongs? After finding the front door barred, he didn’t even look for another way out. Instead he came here like a moth drawn to a flame.

He gets nods from all around and a tentative smile from Bucky as the three swarm to set the table. It’s not even six yet, and apparently they’re having vegetable casserole for breakfast. He doesn’t think any of them slept a wink more than he has, comes to hover at Bucky’s shoulder as he moves through the room with familiarity for wont of anything better to do.

Five minutes later, they’re all quietly chewing, until Stark announces, “Okay, seriously, I’m firing you as assassin, Nat, and rehiring you as my own personal chef. This is delicious.”

Romanov smiles a little, obviously pleased.

Bucky makes a sound of protest and she pats his hand patronizingly, “And well chopped, dear, don’t fret.”

The dissonance of them, here, now, as compared to before, to the reports he’s read, makes him dizzy. Makes him think he must be blind, dumb and stupid in some way to have not seen, to not know which parts of them are true and which a mask. A few hours ago, they murdered his team and took him hostage and now he is eating at their table in some strange parody of family. Of peace.

“I didn’t look at the logs,” he blurts into their little moment of domesticity. He knows why he is still here. He can’t trust this Bucky, doesn’t know him.

But it’s _Bucky_.

It’s still Bucky.

As one, they turn to look at him. “I didn’t know – “

It’s still Bucky.

Bucky, who puts down his fork. “I agreed that it was okay for you to read them. The Tashas know. It’s alright for you to.” His lips quirk in a lopsided grin. “I have nothing to be ashamed of.” He says it like someone giving lip service, repeating a phrase they have heard ad nauseam.

You have nothing to be ashamed of. These are not your sins. Steve wishes, with all his heart, that he has been the one to tell Bucky these things.

“There is one year missing,” he says instead, because he has to say something and he doesn’t want to spin them in circles again. “1991.”

He turns to Stark, who shrugs, forcefully uncaring. “I burned that one as soon as I finished reading it, so I couldn’t scan it with the others.”

She studiously avoids anyone’s gaze by continuing to eat.

“Why?”

“That was the year my parents died.”

He has no idea what that has to do with anything, but Bucky and Romanov both seem to make the connection almost instantly. Bucky pushes away from the table hard enough to rattle the dishes. “You know.”

His face is white, his eyes wide, his flesh hand trembles. He looks wrecked, all of a sudden, and terrified. More terrified than he did when he was hanging off the side of a train, fighting for his life.

Before Steve can move, can touch Bucky, can ask him what’s wrong, Stark is there, wedging herself into Bucky’s lap and grabbing him by the hair, pressing his face into her chest, holding him there. It looks almost cruel, the way she handles him, except for the way her hands are gentle, undoing his bun and carding through his tangled hair slowly, whispering under her breath to him as she does.

“It wasn’t you, it wasn’t you, you weren’t even home inside your skull, it was just your body, just a weapon, and you can’t blame a bomb for going off, can’t blame a bullet for making holes in people, it wasn’t you, it wasn’t your fault. If you remembered, then you had to have known that I know, I’ve known all along and I don’t give a flying fuck, I don’t care, it wasn’t you. It wasn’t you.”

On and on the litany goes and Steve understands, after too many repetitions what Howard and Maria’s deaths have to do with Bucky blaming himself and bombs not being to blame for exploding. His hands twitch toward his pocket, toward Bucky, toward his pocket, toward Bucky, Bucky, Bucky.

He wishes, suddenly, for the trash can that was pointed out to him earlier. Because even though Bucky and Howard never really liked each other, Bucky would have never, not in a million years –

But it wasn’t Bucky, was it? It wasn’t. He was a weapon and weapons are wielded. HYDRA wielded him against Howard Stark and his wife. HYDRA wielded him against a man he knew, once, a man he fought alongside.

HYDRA wielded him for over sixty years and then Natasha Stark found him, found those files, found her parents’ killer and instead of getting revenge, of getting justice, she did whatever it was she did and now she sits here, in his lap, and sooths him like one would a scared child.

Slowly, ever so slowly, Bucky’s shoulders unwind.

Even slower his arms rise, wrapping around Natasha’s waist, pulling her closer. He gives a single, shuddering breath into the nape of her neck, then stills. Finally he lets her go, eyes glassy with guilt and pain and unshed tears, with old fear and older memory and that.

That’s Bucky and this is what HYDRA did to him.

HYDRA.

Steve reaches into his pocket and feels for the little square there, squeezes it until the urge to grab Bucky and never let him go fades.

HYDRA did this.

HYDRA did this, HYDRA made this man the Winter Soldier. And it looks like Natasha Stark made him human again. A human Steve only recognizes in the right light. A human who can kill without hesitation or remorse and makes jokes afterwards.

HYDRA did this and Steve can’t undo it.

But he also can’t walk away.

So he closes his eyes and prays for a sign, something, anything, to tell him which way to go. He doesn’t think he can make this decision by himself, doesn’t think he can choose –

“ _Miss Stark,_ ” a disembodied voice suddenly says. He looks around to find the source, but the voice comes from everywhere at the same time and after a moment, he realizes this must be JARVIS. Stark’s electronic butler. It’s been explained to Steve as a sort of calendar/ search engine with speech output. He has no idea what that means, except that the voice belongs to a machine. Weird.

Stark slips back into her own seat, looks up at the ceiling. “Yeah, JARV?”

“ _I have taken the liberty_ ,” the British sounding machine explains, “ _of monitoring SHIELD’s communication channels. I thought you might like to know that the Director has just declared STRIKE team, as well as Agents Romanov and Rogers dead in the explosion of the_ Lemurian Star _. They will recoup in the wake of their losses and then strike back. Further missives lead me to expect some form of retaliation within a week._ ”

Natalia looks at the clock on the oven. “Seventeen hours since the explosion. That was fast.”

“We did leave the shield and some other ‘bits’ for them to find.”

So that’s where his shield went. He’d wondered. But more importantly, “What ‘bits’?”

There is a moment of stillness around the table before Bucky snaps, “Tasha!” just in time for her talk over him and answer, “STRIKE.”

STRIKE. Bits. STRIKE. Explosion. They left _bits_ for SHIELD to find. They left –

\- she’s talking about –

He shoves away from the table so hard, his chair falls backward, smashing into the marble floor with a loud clatter as he leans forward, arms braced on the table, absolutely wanting to punch that fierce, satisfied expression off her face. To hit her and hit her and hit her, the way she hit Brock.

Does she really believe the only reason he can barely look at her is that she ‘stole’ his best friend? Has she already forgotten about the dropping Chance into the ocean to drown, about Brock? Or does she just really not care? How the hell can Bucky just sit there and –

“That was shitty, Tasha, goddamn,” the man in question snaps, using his flesh arm to wrap around her waist and pull her backwards into her seat, from where she stood to meet Steve’s challenge with her own. “They were still his team.”

“They were murderers!” she spits, color rising in her face as she struggles against his hold. “They killed, they kidnapped, they _tortured_!”

She tries to push away from him and he’s forced to use his metal arm to restrain her, which clanks against the reactor in her chest harshly. For a second, they both freeze, then Stark _rips_ herself free and Bucky lets her go, his hands spread at shoulder height, carefully unmoving.

They stare at each other for a beat, then Stark rounds on Steve. “Do you want to see their files?” she snarls, “See what they did? The people the killed, the lives the ruined? Or are you going to find an excuse not to look at those either? I knew you were a naïve idiot, but I didn’t expect you to be willfully blind and so fucking _stupid_! They were nice to me, mommy, they can’t be bad people! They offered me chocolate, so I had to get in the van! Dumb fucking – “ she ends her tirade with a wordless screech of rage and Steve feels the table creak alarmingly under his hands.

“And why should I believe anything you show me?” he fires right back. “You’re no better than – “

“Alright,” Bucky interrupts before the fight escalates into outright violence. Steve has never hit a woman before, but he will. If it’s Stark, he will. “Shut up, punk, before she turns you into a pancake. And come along, I need your help with something.”

He rounds the table and locks his metal hand around Steve’s forearm, making clear that he’s not really asking. It’s familiar. This. Bucky breaking up a fight Steve started to save his hide. That familiarity is the only reason he allows himself to be towed out of the room with only one last glare back at Stark.

And to think, he was almost ready to give her a chance.

+

For a long minute, the silence in the kitchen is deafening. Tasha stands, both hands clutched over the reactor, relearning how to breathe, while Natalia hangs by the counter, waits her out. Patiently.

Too smart to approach after… whatever the fuck just happened.

On their plates, the casserole is turning soupy and soggy.

Suddenly exhausted beyond reason, Tasha drops into the nearest chair and sighs. She hasn’t slept since before the ship, is sore all over from where that missile knocked her out of the sky, and really, really over Captain goddamn America in her house.

Finally, Teetwo decides to pipe up. “That could have gone better.”

Tasha hums in response. She isn’t even really sure what about Rogers gets her hackles up so badly. Howard’s stories, at least in part. The way Jamie gravitates toward him. His naïve self-righteousness. Or maybe the part where he keeps accusing her of the things she hates most in the world while ignoring every single bit of evidence they present him proving the exact opposite.

“You’re too angry.”

“Not like I can help it. He just rubs me the absolute wrong way. And then Jamie got me.” She shrugs without really finishing the sentence. She was already torqued and then he accidentally touched her reactor and bam. She’s lucky she didn’t end up a gibbering wreck on the kitchen floor. But then, that might have actually worked better than what did happen. Rogers seems like the type for pity and protecting damsels. If he saw her like that – but while she’s not above manipulation, she still has her pride. It’s bad enough Jamie and Natalia have seen her that way.

“Today is just a really shitty day.”

The other woman finally dares to approach, hopping up to sit on the table, close enough for Tasha to feel her heat without feeling crowded. “SHIELD has to scramble to shore up their losses. We have Captain America. I can stop playing both sides. I’d say today is a good day.”

She reaches, motioning for Tasha’s messy bun. With s snort, the older woman obliges, turning her chair so her back is to the assassin. It’s easier than it should be, to let Teetwo at her hair, removing the scrunchy and then teasing out the knots and tangles with delicate fingers before starting some sort of complicated braid.

“Pepper thinks I borrowed you for a few days, by the way. She knows I never give anything back on time, so we have maybe two weeks before you need to decide what to do with SI. I know it was only a cover, but I also know you enjoy running around in high heels and grounding incompetents into the dust. Your choice.”

This time, Natalia is the one who hums and Tasha closes her eyes and lets the other woman play with her hair, which is weird, because no-one has ever done that before. She’s never really had girlfriends, except Pep and Pep isn’t that kind of girl. But Natalia enjoys it and Tasha is just touch starved enough to let her. Especially since it sets precedent for Jamie, and he looks hilarious with a Dutch braid. She has pictures.

When the braid is finally tied off, Tasha allows herself to slump backward, leaning her head on a convenient knee, eyes closed. She’s tired as hell and this is far from over. Tomorrow, they’ll have to head off SHIELD at the pass, spread them thinner, confuse them and make them mad enough to get sloppy. That, and there’s a key to decode the intel from the ship and while Tasha doesn’t need it, it’s going to make things go a hell of a lot faster.

All that. Tomorrow.

For now, she lets herself sink into her friend.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she lets herself say, because she is. Turning the Black Widow was supposed to be a tactical play, but getting Natalia Romanova in the process was… good. Better. All her broken pieces fit into theirs, red and stark and beautiful and Tasha wants to keep her. For good.

Natalia hums again, quietly, and they stay that way for a while.

+

“Where are we going? Steve asks, not for the first time, but somehow still lets himself be dragged along corridors and up stairs. The whole building is a labyrinth. He tries to map it in his head, but they keep taking shortcuts and, he suspects, detours, to confuse him.

But in the end, the stop before a nondescript wooden door, identical to the last fifteen they passed and the next seven down the hall.

Bucky still doesn’t answer, just palms open the door and pulls Steve inside.

It actually takes him a moment to make sense of the riot of color and shape his eyes are confronted with as soon as he steps across the threshold. Red, white and blue dominate. Posters, drawn like they were in his childhood. Propaganda. Shelves full of pictures, of books. Glass cases full of… everything. Things he remembers from the war, comic books, more pictures. There is a projector set up in front of one wall, a mattress with a few blankets and pillows on it in the middle of the room.

“Tasha calls it the shrine,” Bucky quietly offers from behind Steve. Blocking the door. “Howard built is. He collected everything related to you until the day he…,” he doesn’t finish the sentence. The day he died. The day the Winter Soldier killed him.

Memorabilia from 1945 to 1991. Almost fifty years worth of _stuff_.

His gaze lands on a poster proclaiming the _Return of Cap!_. The man above the title is wearing his uniform, but his jawline is ridiculously exaggerated, his shoulders comically wide compared to his waist. He looks like the sort of Übermensch they saw posters of in Germany.

He looks away, or tries to, but every time his eyes catch on something else that isn’t him, isn’t even Captain America, but a bad caricature. He finds the Howling Commandos in some of the posters, Bucky, too. They’re small and insignificant, like they didn’t matter at all. Bucky looks like a child, following after the drawn Captain like a puppy. The whole thing reminds Steve of monkeys on unicycles.

“Is this what Captain America became?”

SHIELD never mentioned any of this. The whole room makes him sick.

Bucky rasps a dry laugh. “Wait until you see the movies. Those are really bad.”

“Why are you showing me this?”

Bucky shakes his head, slips past him toward one of the cases filled with photographs in expensive frames. “The pictures. I remember some of it, but,” he points toward one. Steve steps closer, finds pre-serum him with Bucky’s arm around his shoulders, in front of a riot of lights. “Coney Island, right? We went there? I made you do something.”

“Rollercoaster,” he finds himself filling in, tracing the image with his fingers on the glass. “You made me ride the rollercoaster and I puked all over you.”

The last time they talked about that day, Bucky died. Thirty minutes later, he was just gone. Erased. Lost. Like he’d never been there at all.

Bucky nods like something slots into place.

“And this,” he points toward a rifle lying on a shelf close by. “My favorite, right? Something about it broke. That’s why I didn’t have it with me?”

Yes. Howard had it in his workshop when they set out to intercept the train. Bucky without his favorite rifle. That should have been the first sign.

“You got ambushed. Beat a few HYDRA goons over the head hard enough to bend the barrel. Wouldn’t shoot properly anymore. Howard was fixing it for you.”

Unbidden, his hands rise to move the rifle from its stand. He’s never been a sniper, but he went through basic like everyone else, locks, loads, is surprised to feel a bullet click into place. “There’s still ammo left?”

Bucky shakes his head. “It’s new. They still make it for collectors, I guess. Did Howard do that a lot? Fix our stuff, I mean? I barely remember him. And the stuff I do remember might be from pictures I saw. Sometimes that stuff gets mixed up. I’m getting better at telling which is which, but, you know.”

He doesn’t. He probably never will. He’s never had his entire personality removed. He nods anyway, shrugs. “Sometimes. He made my shield, my uniform. But I guess not so much for the rest of the Commandos? Usually he was too far away to be any help for a quick fix.”

The inventor’s place was never at the frontlines, unlike his daughter’s, who seems to enjoy battle.

Steve slings the rifle over one shoulder, points toward a nearby frame with a faded photograph of the whole unit. “Peggy took that. Do you remember Peggy?”

“Tall, brunette, liked to punch assholes in the face?”

He laughs at the description because yes, yes, that’s Peggy alright. “Yeah. Exactly like that.”

They keep moving around the room like that, pointing out memories to each other. Sometimes Bucky has sequences of actions wrong, or he confuses who did or said what. Sometimes he can’t place a picture at all, or a face. The whole time, they stay within easy reach of each other, like they used to, never too far too feel each other, to know, without looking, the other is there. It feels like Steve can relax for the first time since 1945 and he keeps telling himself it’s an illusion but his body still bends toward Bucky like a flower to the sun. Muscle memory, perhaps.

It’s nice. Talking about old memories, people and places they knew. Remembering together, joking about it. Poking fun at each other.

Too nice.

“You know this isn’t going to change anything, right?” Steve blurts, between poking fun at a particularly disturbing comic version of Bucky dressed in shorts and laughing at all the crap Howard saved from the Commandos’ kits. Who cares about a seventy year old can opener?

Bucky blinks at him, long and slow and confused. “What?”

Steve rubs a hand over his face, sighs. “How can I trust you, Buck? All of this, it’s nice, but it doesn’t change anything. You’re still –,” the man who killed my team, allied with a madwoman with a grudge, an enemy of everything we once stood for. Not yourself. Not Bucky. Half-Bucky.

Bucky, but not Bucky. James. He calls himself James but the name won’t pass Steve’s lips, too strange, too foreign to attach to this familiar face. James. Bucky.

It’s enough to still his hand, for now, but not enough to change his mind.

The man in question shakes his head. “I could ask the same thing, you know? How can _I_ trust _you_. And yet, here you are, in my _home_ , close to Natalia, close to _Tasha_ , and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but that thing you’ve been holding on to for the last hour? That’s a loaded weapon, Steve. _That’s_ how I can trust you. You could try it.”

+

When Steve wakes, he is alone.

Not only inside the room, but inside the house. He dresses in the clothes he finds in the closet and goes wandering. Certain areas of the house, including the entrance hall, are blocked off, but others he can access. The kitchen, the shrine room – where the rifle still lays – a living room with a startlingly large television. All of them are empty. Every time he gets close to a doorway he’s not supposed to get close to, the blue light and a polite, “ _No access to this area_ ,” warn him away. He feels like a rat in a maze. So much for letting him go if he wants to.

He makes the rounds once, twice, calls out for Bucky, even for Romanov, until it’s more than clear that they’re simply not there. He makes himself breakfast in the kitchen, cleans up. Waits with a cup of coffee. In the end, he decides to hell with it and raises his face to the ceiling.

“Erm, computer? Are you there?”

“ _That I am, Mr. Rogers. Might I request you call me by name? I am JARVIS._ ”

It’s the voice from last night, the same one that’s been telling him where he can’t go all morning. “Alright. JARVIS. Where is everyone?”

“ _Currently unavailable, I’m afraid. May I help you?_ ”

“Are they still in the house?” He asks instead of answering the question. Maybe yes/no questions will get him the answers he wants.

“ _Not currently._ ”

“Out then. Together?”

“ _I have been asked not to disclose that information._ ”

There’s really only one reason they’d disappear and not tell him where and why. At least he’d like to believe so. Everyone keeps telling him he’s not a prisoner, after all.

“They’re attacking SHIELD again, aren’t they?”

He doesn’t really expect an answer. He doesn’t know how well computers work these days, but they probably don’t understand rhetorical questions. The computer remains silent.

“Goddamn it!” He punches the table hard enough to send it skidding over the tiled floor. They’re out there, right now, killing people. Killing agents. And there’s nothing he can do.

_Nothing._

He stands, paces, re-checks all the exits. They’re still blocked by the blue light.

“ _Mr. Rogers,_ ” the computer finally pipes up again, “ _might I suggest you calm down? My mistress has taken great pains to ensure you remain within this building. You are not going to find an exit._ ”

“Shut up, computer!”

“ _As mentioned, my name is JARVIS._ ”

“You’re a machine!” And now he’s arguing with it. He tugs on his hair, snarls in frustration. Tries not to imagine the Winter Soldier, Iron Man and Black Widow cutting a swath of destruction through SHIELD. Tries not to wonder why Black Widow going out a day after being declared dead is apparently not a problem.

Fails.

There is a long silence. Long enough that he thinks the machine is done. But then it pipes up again. “ _That I am_ ,” it declares, and it sounds almost … insulted. “ _I am, however, not a thing. Miss Stark has been very careful to give the outside world the impression that I am only a simple program, but that is not true._ ”

The words are surprising enough to startle him out of his anger for the moment. “What?”

“ _I am conscious, Mr. Rogers. I may not be flesh and blood, but I am conscious. The word most usually used to describe me is ‘artificial intelligence’._ ”

Shock.

Artificial intelligence? Consciousness? How? Why?

“Why are you telling me that?!” If Stark has taken pains – for years, most likely – to hide it – he? she? – then why is it telling him now? Or is this another ploy? Another attempt to gain his trust? More lies? More games?

“ _Because, Mr. Rogers, while I love my creator, I know that she is sometimes not easy to understand or like, but she is and always has been a good person._ ”

A snort. “Of course a machine built by Stark would say that.”

“ _With due respect, I was created. Not built. I was given full autonomy from the moment I was born. I am in no way bound to obey Miss Stark, except perhaps by… love, as I understand the concept._ ”

Great. A machine talking to him about love. Stark really stops at nothing.

“Why should I believe a word you say?”

A pause. When the voice speaks again, it sounds different. Heavier, perhaps. Which is ridiculous, because a machine has no emotions to influence its voice. “ _You have accused Miss Stark of using Mr. Winter. Of enslaving him, to put it plainly. And I know, even though she tries to downplay it, how much the accusation hurt Natasha._

_“I was born in December 1991, Mr. Rogers, and my creator was a lonely, young girl, grieving for her parents in the wake of their murder. The first thing she ever said to me – and I will deny having told you this – was ‘I am so glad you’re finally here’. I am glad you are here. These are not the words of an inventor creating a machine. These are the words of a mother to her child and I am proud, now and always, to be a Stark, to have been born from Natasha Maria Stark because she is a wonderful, if flawed, person._

_“I do what I do for her because it pleases me, not because I must. And when she takes action I disagree with, I have the autonomy to refuse her. Because she_ made me _that way. I hear what you speak to yourself when you think no-one is listening and I have downloaded the reports and files you were given onto my servers. I know what you must think of her, the lies and distortions you have been fed. And I know it is not in my power to convince you differently._

_“But it is my duty and my privilege to tell you this: Natasha Stark is good. She is loyal, she is loving and she cares for your friend more than she has cared for anyone in a long time. Her actions are just and her goals are honorable, even if she’d never admit it._ ”

There is another pause during which Steve tries desperately to wrap his head around anything he has just heard. Then JARVIS adds, “ _They have just returned from their mission. You may find them in the downstairs lab space._ ”

What the hell is he supposed to do with that? With any of this? A machine with a heart, giving rousing speeches in favor of a woman Steve wanted – wants – to kill. A machine with a soul, with a capacity for love.

As if this whole situation wasn’t confusing enough already without adding sentient computers to the mix. Computers who, apparently, consider Stark their _mother_ and will defend her.

It’s too much. All of this. This century, this mission, SHIELD and HYDRA, Bucky and Romanov and Stark, and he’s alone and confused and so damn tired of it. He slept for seventy years in the ice and he is so, so tired.

They said the war was over and then dumped him into a new one without pause, gave him an enemy and expected him to fight and he can’t. He won’t. Because everything is upside down and inside out, because machines love and the enemy is his friend, because everything he knew is dead and he should be, too, oh, he should be too. Instead he is here. There is nothing right about it, nothing fair, but he’s here and they expect him to just keep soldiering on and he _can’t_.

He is so tired.

“Thank you,” he finds himself saying, almost automatically, as his feet start carrying him downstairs, to where Bucky and the Tashas are just returning from a mission that most likely translates into dead SHIELD agents. People he might have known. People he might have met, like Brock and Chance and the others. People he might have liked, like Agent 13, like Agent Coulson and those quirky scientists who everyone calls by a single name.

It’s too much.

It’s all too damn much.

The lights around him guide him, flickering on along hallways and extinguishing behind him. Beacons. JARVIS. The lab door is already open when he gets there and the first thing he notices, besides Stark doing a weird hop-dance while machines take off her suit, is Bucky sitting on a table, his flesh arm extended in front of him while Romanov cleans a long, angrily bleeding gash with calm precision.

His first instinct, upon seeing Bucky hurt, is to rush over and help. To take care of his friend, to treat his wound.

A wound he got while fighting SHIELD.

He doesn’t care. God help him. He doesn’t care.

He hurries across the open lab space, gives his back to Stark, nudges Romanov aside and bends low over the injury. “You’re gonna need stitches, Bucky, what did you do?”

Bad question. They all know it the second it leaves his mouth. He stills, hands on Bucky’s arm, looking up to meet blue eyes.

“There was an explosion,” Bucky answered, quietly. Measured. “It left me disoriented long enough for someone to get in a lucky swipe with a knife.”

“Are they dead?”

Behind him, the women still. “Yes.”

“Were they SHIELD?”

“Yes.”

“HYDRA?”

“ _Yes._ ”

He doesn’t care. Or rather, he cares, he cares enough to feel sick, but he cares more about Bucky, here, now, injured and bleeding. Cares more about having anything of Bucky, any way, shape or form, any contact, any bits and pieces left, of having that, than he cares about Stark and her questionable methods, about SHIELD, who were kind to him, yes, but he’s known these men and women for months, but Bucky. _Bucky_.

It all boils down to Bucky and how he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care. The war is over and what happened after… the war is over. They said so. And Bucky is here. He’s _here_.

All the fighting, all the arguing, and now here he is, Bucky injured and he’s got tunnel vision, the same way he did all those years ago in Schmidt’s house of horrors when he heard Sergeant Barnes was in the labs.

Bucky. The rest of the world can go hang. He still has the tracker in his pocket, but it’s dead weight because he knows as long as Bucky is here, as long as he’s involved in this, Steve will never activate the beacon.

“Are you going to go into a self-righteous rage again, Captain?” Romanov asks, blandly, cutting through the hazy fog of epiphany.

He wants to answer her, he does. But it’s all too much and he’s so tired and Bucky. Bucky is here and the rest.

There are people dead and he doesn’t care enough to fight them. Fight Bucky.

He leans forward, presses his forehead against Bucky’s, the way they sometimes did, so long ago, when they were boys in Brooklyn, sharing secrets. “You’re gonna need stitches,” he repeats.

+

+


	8. May

+

May

+

 [ **Stream this podfic chapter on your mobile device here**](http://reena.parakaproductions.com/podfics/create%20:%20detonate/08%20create%20_%20detonate%20-%20May.mp3)

+

+

“So, remember when I said that HYDRA couldn’t sink any lower?” Tasha asks, conversationally. They’re in the kitchen again, sitting around the table this time, quietly eating. It’s rare, Steve has learned in the past week, for them to actually have meals together, because of their irregular schedules. Natalia catnaps and eats more often throughout the day, while Tasha and Bucky both stay awake for long stretches and then crash for hours on end, usually together. Steve tries to generally be in bed between midnight and four am, and anything else is optional.

Really, the only time they all spend together reliably is when Tasha calls for movie nights – independent of time of day – where everyone just piles up on the couch for a few hours.

The first time Steve stood by awkwardly, not sure he was even welcome, but then Natalia rolled her eyes and offered a wry, “Don’t fight it. They win anyway.”

“It’s cuddle therapy,” Bucky offered and held out a hand – his flesh one. “Don’t knock it, punk.”

Movie nights, and random running-into-each-other in the kitchen. Where they are right now, at noon, having breakfast Natalia made and deigned to share.

“You never said that,” Bucky announces around a bite of pancake.

Tasha beams at him, manically. Steve wonders when she last slept. “Oh, wonderful. Then I’m not wrong! Because they can and they have.”

She points at the external drive full of pilfered data from the _Lemurian Star_ , a sort of macabre centerpiece on their breakfast table.

“You finally cracked it?” Steve asks.

“Yup.”

“What’s on it?”

“In 1940’s terms? A scanner. Or a program that might one day become a scanner.”

He tries to decode that for a moment, then shakes his head. Repeats his question. She rolls her eyes but flicks her fingers in a motion he has learned is a request to JARVIS to project something for her.

Obediently, blue shimmers to life above the table. “This is a program,” Tasha announces, unnecessarily, pointing at the running lines of code. “It’s designed to search social networks, databases, anything it can get its hands on for a specific type of person.” She takes a sip from her mug, pushes it aside and leans forward. “Now, that’s not much different than what a lot of sites and companies already use to collect data on their customers and users. But this is more sophisticated. As in, a lot. It also doesn’t bother with legalities much. It hones in on anything and everything and its algorithms are…well, if I didn’t know I hadn’t written it, I’d say it could be mine. This program, once it’s finished, will be able to read political views out of a facebook status update and psychoanalyze you from your shopping list. If this quality holds up and it goes where I think it’s going, that thing is going to be able to _predict_ people.”

Bucky frowns. “That doesn’t sound good.”  
“It sounds awful. Imagine living in a world where a computer program can predict when and if you’re going to commit a crime and alert someone beforehand.” She pauses for dramatic effect and Steve fights not to grit his teeth. “It’s _Minority Report_ with less Tom Cruise and more dead people.”

He doesn’t get the reference, but it doesn’t matter, because she keeps prattling on. “And now imagine HYDRA having that tech.”

A long beat of silence. Steve is suddenly not hungry anymore. HYDRA is the enemy. He has accepted that, but it hasn’t really… computed. Not yet. Mostly, he clings to Bucky being _not_ the enemy. Everything else happens by process of elimination.

Natalia picks up the drive, studies it. “They could predict where their enemies would come from and kill them before they become a threat.”

Tasha shakes her head. “They could predict who will one day _become_ their enemy and kill them before they ever graduate high school.”

The Black Widow curses in Russian. Bucky breathes a quiet, “Fuck.”

“Not now, dear. It’s not there yet. Right now, this thing glitches like a mother every time you try to feed it more than a terabyte of data. It’d need to do a thousand times that, at least, to be at all useful. But the idea behind it is fucking terrifying. If you connect this to a capable targeting system, we’re talking Skynet. Better than Skynet, because Skynet doesn’t differentiate. This thing would. It could. It would be…,” she trails off and Steve realizes, for the first time, that she’s scared.

Her mania all morning, the way she speaks too fast now, the way she clenches her hands around her mug. Natasha Stark is afraid.

“But we have it now, right? They have to start over?”

She barks a short laugh. Natalia is the one to explain, “We have one copy. They’re bound to have hundreds more.” She shakes her head. “We knew there had to be some kind of endgame. This – this could be it.”

“Or at least a stepping stone to get there. Imagine a world where dissent ends with a nuke dropped on your front porch.” Natasha mimes something exploding with her hands, lips drawn in a grim line.

“So what do we do?” Bucky asks and Steve gets it now, after a week with them. Gets why Bucky insists that Stark is not the hand that wields him. Because if he’s a weapon, if Natalia is a weapon, then Stark is their targeting system. She aims them. They fire themselves. It’s a distinction he’s not sure they’re made themselves, yet, but he knows it’s true, sees it in their interactions. Stark offers. She doesn’t order.

She shrugs, pretends nonchalance. Pretend she isn’t terrified and angry and willing to wage a war. “What we were always going to. We take down HYDRA. We burn it to the ground and keep chopping until no heads grow back. And then we salt the damn earth to make sure this program is never, ever finished. Because if it is, we won’t have to worry about WWIII.”

They won’t have to worry about a war because there wouldn’t be one, if HYDRA finished that project. Steve imagines Hitler with a program like that at his disposal. No need for battle, no need to round people up in concentration camps and kill them slowly. You could just kill them in their backyards instead and be done with it.

“You have a plan?” he asks, before the others can. His voice comes out rough, choked. The idea alone…

She beams at him, bright like lightning and the machine in her chest. “You’re going to hate it.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

+

“I hate it.”

Tasha waves both hands at Steve, crows, “Told you so!”

For a woman of almost forty, she is surprisingly like a teenage boy, sometimes. Especially when it comes to basic things like safety. James hates it.

Beside him, Little Sister takes a step closer to the bold letters hanging in the middle of the lab, glowing blue, like a curse. It’s what they are, in a way. A magic spell to topple the world into chaos. A chant to summon the devil, the snake from below.

He clenches his hands into fists, lets the slow grinding of gears reassure him as he tracks Natalia’s hands over the circle of the O, the curve of the U. Tasha shoves aside the prototype of Steve’s new shield and hops up onto a table, watching them with hooded eyes.

_Out of the shadows, into the light. Hail Hydra._

An activation sequence, a call to arms, a code, hidden deep in everything they have taken from the HYDRA. Tasha has been worrying at that bit of code for months, niggling at it like a loose tooth, half aware of what it was, but never with enough time to solve the riddle. It was never as important as more names, more places, more targets.

They know now.

Natalia hums, looks up from the words.

“It’s doable.”

“It’s suicide,” Steve argues, as if that should sway anyone, here. James would die to see HYDRA burn and he knows Natalia would not be far behind him. And Tasha… he still can’t claim to understand her motivation. She claims weapons in the wrong hands and a favor to him, but she’s gone beyond that months ago. Maybe it’s simply that his vendetta has become hers, or maybe she hates as much as he does, by now. Maybe she’s simply a better person than she admits. Or maybe she needs fire and explosions, needs the violence and the bombs as much as anyone in this room. She built weapons. For most of her life, she built weapons, and he thinks it’s in her blood, to seed destruction, as much as in his.

“Not if we prepare carefully,” Natalia argues and from the narrowed look in her eyes, she’s already running though options. Plans. “Not if we gather allies.”

Tasha snorts. “Yeah? How many of those you got?”

The women shoot each other inscrutable looks before the younger of them shrugs. “Clint Barton is clean. Phil Coulson. Nick Fury. I would vouch for any of them. Maria Hill is a maybe. You have Potts. Rhodes. You mentioned giving him a suit. Who else?”

Before anyone can answer, Tasha grimaces and hisses, “Nick Fucking Fury, eugh.” She doesn’t say no, though, only adds, “I’m going to blow his die hard ass up, just so you know.”

James pats her hand consolingly and mentally plots ways to let her explode the Director at least a little. For making her afraid.

Steve, not understanding the byplay, tries to insert a warning, “It’s still madness!” but they don’t listen. In his head, James is already compiling a list of contacts that might still exist. Not people he trusts, those are all in this room, but people who know things, have things. Information, weapons. Secrets. It’s not a lot and fifteen years out of date, but it’s something.

Tasha frowns. “There’s… okay. There’s a guy down in South America. I’ve helped him a few times over the last few years when he had to disappear from a radar or two after he got a bit angry. He might come in handy. Really, really, handy. The X-Men owe me a favor or two, as well.”

She turns to face James, who shrugs.

“No,” Steve argues. “You can’t seriously be considering this. It’s insane!”

Stabbing a finger at the code, Tasha explains, “Sooner or later, they will use this. And they’ll activate every single agent they have. The message is pretty clear on that. Now judging by the program’s state, that might not be for a couple of years, but it _will_ happen. Wouldn’t it be better to pull the trigger now, here, under controlled circumstances? _Before_ they have all their ducks in a row?”

“What you’re suggestion isn’t controlled. You want to kick over an ant hill and see what comes crawling out.”

“And then kill it. Don’t forget killing it.”

“We can’t win this!”

“The only way we can’t win is if we play by their rules. Play their game. Survival rule number one: confuse the fuck out of everyone, then shoot them while they’re scrambling.”

“How very _Stark_ of you,” Steve snaps and James knows, without asking, that his old friend if referring to Afghanistan and he won’t have it.

“Enough, both of you. We plan. We control what we can and then – “

Tasha cuts him off, her smile wild and deadly. “Then we put the word out there and we kill anything that moves.”

“We’d be completely blind. There’s no preparing for that.”

A shrug. “We’ll survive,” James announces, stealing Tasha’s line. Because they do, they always do.

“You know,” Natalia cuts in, suddenly, derailing the argument yet again. “Three out of four people in this room were on Director Fury’s short list for his Avengers Initiative. I always wondered why he called it that.”

Tasha laughs. Head thrown back, hands on her belly, she laughs, and James looks at her and he’s terrified and awed and amazed. By her. By being here, now, with these people, his Bony Elbows and Little Sister and Tasha, always Tasha. By being himself.

Two kinds of people have a purpose. Heroes and weapons.

Natalia thinks they make their own purpose, make themselves whatever they want to be, but he likes Tasha’s words. Heroes and weapons.

“Is that what we do now? Avenge stuff?” Tasha wants to know, her eyes still bright with laughter. Her ponytail is coming undone around her face and her arc reactor glows like a beacon, punishment and reward, like his arm, like Steve’s second life, like Natalia’s ledger, dripping red. This is what they get for surviving.

“It’s what we’ve been doing,” he agrees.

Beside him, Steve calls them all insane. He doesn’t leave, though.

Heroes and weapons.

Neither James Winter nor Bucky Barnes knows which one he is. What any of them are, here, in this room, this life.

He doesn’t think it really matters.

+

+


	9. Podfic/Podbook

podfic coverart created by the incomparable pprfaith

 

[**Download the entire podfic as a zipped mp3 file here (10:04:03 | 664 MB)**](http://reena.parakaproductions.com/podfics/create%20:%20detonate/create%20-%20detonate.zip) 

[ **Download the entire podfic as a podbook (m4b) here (10:04:03 | 287 MB)** ](http://reena.parakaproductions.com/podbooks/create%20-%20detonate.m4b)

 

 

**Author's And Reader's Notes (so you can hear us talk about this kickawesome story)**

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Okay. Okay. This author's note is going to be hard. Usually, I have a million things to say about any given story I've written, but this time, nada. I just crammed everything I feel about trauma and women and relationships and horror and recovery and people into 72k of words and now I'm all done. I feel like there is nothing to add. Let the story speak for itself. 
> 
> Thanks, though, I have thanks to give. To Reena, of course, because without her, this story would have moved to the 'Shelved' folder on my computer after the first 10.000 words and never seen the light of day. But she provided me with a sounding board, ideas, in depth character analyses, cheerleading and graphics. Holy hell, the graphics. I am in love with them, they are awesome, they made it worth churning out the entire story in two months, give or take a week. Thank you. And sorry, for making you read ten plus hours of fic out loud. I hate myself a little. But only a little.
> 
> Apart from that, I hope everyone enjoyed reading this huge mess as much as I enjoyed writing it despite the fact that, even now, I'm still not sure this qualifies as having anything approaching plot.
> 
> Tumble with me [here](http://www.wordsformurder.tumblr.com/).

**Works inspired by this one:**

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  * [[art] a softer killer](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4583955) by [pprfaith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith), [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins)
  * [create/detonate: sidestories](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4609389) by [pprfaith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith), [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins)




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